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Content strategy isn’t a nice to have (or why I don’t want your brand to be my friend)

The planning and discussing and repeated rounds of debate and review and re-working to the nth degree of copy for the typical ad campaign often seems never-ending. Ensuring that work meets brand guidelines, is in keeping with the brand values, brand pyramid, brand molecule or what have you, yada yada yada.

As with any decent media strategy. The role for channels should be carefully thought-through, with a clear definition of the comms task and the role that each channel should play, and so on.

But when it comes to brand content in social channels like Twitter and Facebook, or even sometimes on their blogs and brand sites, carefully considered comms and content strategy appears to be falling by the wayside for more and more brands. Consideration for tone of voice – which would be so rigorously scrutinised in an advert – appears to be totally ignored.

It’s lazy. It shows a lack of thought, and a lack of understanding of the people they’re seeking to engage and consideration for the user.

Take Rightmove. Their service is about helping people buy, sell, rent or let their home. It’s one of the biggest life decisions you’ll make. Property’s serious business. The market’s changing, it’s tough whichever side of the fence you’re on. If you’re in the property market, what you really need is reliable info, help & guidance. You want a trusted partner to help you make the right decision.

From a content strategy point of view, how could a brand like Rightmove add value? What do customers and prospects most need and want? Expert advice, market insight, the latest news & updates before anyone else, perhaps? Maybe with an authoritative but friendly tone of voice?

Or maybe the brand could just throw random stuff at Twitter to show how TOTALLY AWESOME they are!!!!

Like pointing out (admittedly very cute, but unsure what it has to do with Rightmove) a video of Elmo from Sesame St cooking paella with Philip Schofield & Holly Willoughby on This Morning:

Or chatting about what people got up to over the bank holiday weekend:

Or moaning about how rubbish the weather is:

It’s partly the Innocentification of cutesy, zany copy where it’s just not plausible or appropriate for the brand (for more on the Innocentification of copy and brand authenticity, see the most excellent Shift Run Stop episode with the lovely & talented Denise Wilton – lovely friend, co-founder of B3ta, currently creative director at BERG, and formerly creative director at Moo).

But it’s also suggestive of a complete lack of content strategy – of thinking how the brand can really add value, what kind of content will be most appropriate, within which channels, and what tone of voice will communicate this most effectively. Of not really understanding what kind of relationship the people they’re trying to engage want to have with their brand. Whether they want a brand to be useful, helpful and deliver against their brand promise – or whether they want a brand to be their mate.

We strategists & planners are partly to blame. We’ve tried to encourage our clients to communicate more humanly and less like faceless corporations. But without a clear and well-defined content strategy, it appears we’ve opened Pandora’s box.

Content should engender trust.

Brands should use their content – digital or otherwise – to communicate the values and associations they want to convey.

They should use their content to deliver on their brand promise. To be useful. Helpful. Yes, be friendly, but be appropriate:

Content strategy isn’t a nice to have, brands. What you do, what you say, and how you say it, what relationship you want to have with the people you’re trying to engage, matters. Really it does. Give it some proper care and attention, why don’t you?

Addendum: Bobbie Johnson has written a fab article on GigaOm which articulates his frustration with what he terms the hypercasual far more eloquently – def worth checking out: Hypercasual : when the web gets a little too friendly

 

(HT @simonth for pointing out Rightmove to me)

September 5, 2011 in Brands, Communication | Permalink | 5 Comments

Giving as your business model

Willsh’s latest post on ‘Advertising is not the thing that you do. It’s the story of the things you’ve done‘ reminded me of one of the most inspirational moments of this year’s SXSW – hearing Blake Mycoskie, founder of Toms Shoes, tell the story of founding & growing the business, and revealing that from June 2011 it would no longer be just a shoe company, but a wider one-for-one business. His keynote was incredibly moving (quite a few moist eyes in the audience, I may have had some grit in mine too!) and it was absolutely inspirational to hear someone speak with such passion, and equally thrilling to hear about the success of his business given the one-for-one model that everyone thought would never succeed. For the uninitiated, TOMS is not a charity, but a for-profit company which (currently) sells shoes – whereby for every pair purchased, TOMS give a new pair to a child in need:

So far, TOMS have given away over 1m shoes to children all over the world. It’s pretty awe-inspiring stuff (their 2010 giving report is worth a look, as it’s totally full of win).

Mycoskie made it absolutely clear that it wasn’t the shoes that made the company such a success. It was the story behind the shoes. People weren’t just buying any old shoe, but they were buying into a movement. And the word-of-mouth generated as the company started to grow was incredibly powerful, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that this was because the purpose and story of giving was at the very heart of the company. People believed in its mission, and wanted to share it with others.

Putting giving at the heart of the business didn’t doom it to failure, as many naysayers said when it launched. It’s what made it is today. Firstly, because customers become your greatest marketers, because they have a story to tell, and secondly because it’s better for attracting and retaining employees, because people want to be part of something.

I also saw another lovely example of giving as central to a company’s business model, weirdly while randomly channel-hopping, and stumbling across a BBC3 programme called Working Girls, which happened to feature one of my earliest kindergarten friends, a girl called Priya Lakhani who I shared Sticklebrix with when I was 3. She’s now a very successful businesswoman, who jacked in a career in the law to set up her own company selling fresh curry sauces. Yes it’s great curry sauce, but it’s curry sauce with a difference. For every sale of a Masala Masala pot, a hot meal is given to a homeless person in India. This little startup has given away over 50,000 hot meals to people in need and business is booming.

Masala Masala has a four point charter about how the company intends to support people in India:

On the ground by giving away free meals, providing education to slum children, ensuring healthcare is available in the slums and supporting sustainability projects by lobbying governments

“I think it’s really important we mix corporate social responsibility with commercial enterprise. If I ever start up any more companies, which I hope to do, I’ll do the same thing,” Lakhani insists. “I won’t start up a business without an ethical arm attached to it,” she adds, defiantly.

People aren’t just buying the curry sauce, they’re buying the story behind the curry sauce, and the difference that can make. It’s a genuine point of difference, in a world where we’re bombarded with choices.

So many brands spend aeons trying to devise campaigns to create a sense of differentiation where there is in fact little to no difference between them and their competitors. I know, I’ve worked on them. It’s really not very satisfying.

Conversely it’s so delightful to see examples of brands which really do have genuine ‘reasons to believe’. What’s brilliant is that these are hugely successful, for-profit businesses. Giving as your business model isn’t just some naive happy-clappy ideal. It’s also not a token nod to CSR. It’s fundamental to the brand and business and something that provides true market differentiation. It gives people a reason to buy your product. It creates a story – a genuine story rooted in a fundamental truth, not a brand story created for an ad campaign – which people want to buy into, and share.

Good business is good for business. And how much more successful would brands’ campaigns be if there was a genuine story at the heart?

April 5, 2011 in Brands | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Promises Promises

So NatWest have been making a big song and dance of late about their new Customer Charter

You see, they take the notion of their ‘brand promise’ very seriously, and want to make sure they actually deliver on this. Oh yes. They say so themselves, so it must be true:

You see when we say ‘Helpful Banking’, we want to make sure it really is.

They say the charter’s a public promise to become Britain’s most helpful bank. It’s got lovely-sounding promises- and my, don’t they sound sincere?

We are committed to making banking easy
We are committed to helping when you need us
We are committed to supporting the communities we work in
We are committed to listening

Except that it’s all well and good to promise something, but if you’re going to make a song and dance about how much you want to BE helpful, instead of just saying you’re helpful, you might do well to see if you can actually deliver on the promises you’re making.

I’m a NatWest customer. Like most people, I’ve never bothered moving my current account – I got my first bank account at NatWest (yes, I wanted the pig-shaped piggy banks they gave out, my loyalties were easily-bought back then) and it always seemed too much hassle to move.

I personally don’t find them the most helpful bank. In fact, I keep coming up against fairly simple things I’d like them to do that other UK high street banks offer their customers, and they seem not to be able to do anything about it.

Take travelling abroad. Earlier this year I was travelling a lot for work. Lots of countries I’d never been to before, so fair enough a withdrawal in Buenos Aires out of the blue probably looks a bit dodgy. So they block my card. We’re running late, we need to get in a cab to get to the meeting, and I can’t get cash out. Luckily my colleague’s able to help out, and we make it in time.

So I call NatWest to unblock the card, and say, OK I’m going to be travelling a lot over the next few weeks, if I tell you where I’m going to be, can you log it on the system so when I do try and use the card in these places, you don’t block me and I then have to spend a fortune calling your call centre to get it unblocked. You know, like other card providers do. No, they say, there’s nothing they can do. Even if they put it on the system, it’ll still block the card – nothing they can do, it’s just the way it works. So every country I go to, the card’s blocked, and I have to call them again. Racking up a whopping phone bill in the process.

Ah, they say, it’s for your own protection. To stop fraud, they say. It’s for your own good. But, I say, Lloyds don’t automatically block you. If you use your card abroad which triggers the system to think there’s some kind of ‘abnormal activity’ on your card, it sends you a text and asks you to respond if that transaction was in fact you, or if it was some shady fraudster. If you say it wasn’t you, the card’s blocked. If you don’t respond, they block it as a precautionary measure. But if it is you, you simply send back a text, they don’t block your card, and you can carry on using it.

Ah, well, sorry we don’t offer that. Would you consider it, I say – it’s a lot more customer friendly, and it only costs me the price of a text instead of the time and expense of trying to get my card unblocked, as well as actually letting me withdraw cash, which is, y’know, its intended purpose. I don’t know, they say, it’s really not my decision.

So bouncing round the world, my card kept getting blocked. Hoorah. Thanks NatWest – who very helpfully said ‘yes we know it’s annoying but it’s the system, there’s just nothing we can do, it’s the fraud protection, you see’. Very helpful banking indeed.

Or getting a new card. Like most people I go to work, when they send out a new card NatWest require it to be signed for, usually via a courier company. For ‘security reasons’ they won’t send it to my work. They can only send to my home. But I won’t be there, I say. Sorry, they say, it’s the rules. So they deliver the card to my home, leave a card that says ‘Sorry you weren’t in’ and I can have the delivery redelivered to my work – as long as I have photo ID when I sign (in fact, I can even give the receptionist my driving licence and she’s allowed to sign on my behalf). So it ends up at my work, where I wanted it to be, but it’s had to go through two courier journeys, instead of one, which is a waste of time, money, and petrol. If NatWest let me just skip step 1 and go straight to step 2, which shows it patently IS possible to get it delivered to my work as long as I have the right ID to ensure security, I would get my card quicker, it would cost them less and it would reduce emissions of a courier driving around town for a journey we’ve established up front will be unnecessary.

But they can’t do that. Sorry madam, it’s just the rules. So very very helpful.

So I ask about other options. Could I have the card delivered to a branch, and I’ll collect it there? Oh yes madam, we can do that – but it has to be your ‘home’ branch. My home branch is still back in Manchester, because I never bothered to change the ‘home’ branch as there never seemed any need to do so, as I do all my banking online. I offer to bring in photo ID, name signed in blood, first born child, whatever it takes to get the sodding card, but no, they can’t do this. But Lloyds let you collect a card from a branch that isn’t your home branch, I say, why can they do this but you can’t? Er, we don’t know madam, I’m afraid your options are to have the card delivered to your home or your home branch – oh and while you’re on the line, would you be interested in hearing about any of our other products we’d love to sell you.

So, NatWest you’re far from the most helpful bank. It’s lovely that you’re giving time to community projects and offering MoneySense classes to schools, really it is. But you’re my bank. I want you to get the banking bit right. And my experience of you is that you really aren’t very helpful at all. And especially not the most helpful bank when you refuse to offer services that would make my banking experience unquestionably better, that other high street banks appear to be able to offer without any real problems. So not really doing too well on that ‘Britain’s most helpful bank’ bit, are you?

And it’s not just me:

Natwest, one of two banks that taxpayers rescued in the credit crunch, is turning over a new leaf with its customer charter and it is making sure that everyone knows it is committed to becoming ‘Britain’s most helpful bank’.

But helpful isn’t the word that some critics are using to describe Natwest, part of Royal Bank of Scotland.

Instead, they accuse the bank of using its new customer charter as a smokescreen to hide bad news.

Although the charter pledges to extend opening hours at Natwest’s busiest branches and maintain ‘banking services’ where it is the only bank left in a community, the critics say it omits to mention that simultaneously it is axing small branches while reducing hours in other, mainly rural, branches.

[ Critics turn on NatWest's customer charter ]

And it’s all well and good spending millions on flashy ad campaigns pledging your commitment to working towards Britain’s most helpful bank, but it’s ever so slightly undermined if this doesn’t come from the heart of your business and developed from the inside out (Justin Basini wrote a fantastic post about this a while ago, which I’d heartily recommend).

Yes, I know I really should get off my arse and change my current account if I’m so unhappy with NatWest (hello inertia!).

We all know that a brand promise is usually that and we’re used to brands failing to deliver against it. And this is probably more of a rant than a particularly enlightening post, as should we really be surprised that NatWest’s grand claims are just that?

But wouldn’t it be nice, wouldn’t it be just awesome, if a brand actually did what it said it would, eh?

November 1, 2010 in Brands | Permalink | 2 Comments

The Value of Real



[ photo courtesy ]

Digital technology is ace. The post-digital world is hugely exciting.

But sometimes what you really really want is world 1.0 – physical stuff. Doesn’t need to be internet-enabled, internet-of-things real stuff. Just real see-it and touch-it and take-it-home-with you physical stuff.

Now, I love me some online shopping. Most of the time I’d be happy not to have to schlep round the shops, and the more I can order online the better.

Except when I don’t.

Sometimes you really want goods you can touch and take home with you. And a real person you can talk to.

We all know that certain categories are always going to demand a physical retail presence, no matter how much their online sales may also flourish.

But with a physical store presence comes the assumption that you’ll be able to choose a product, buy it there and then, and take it home with you. Especially if the store in question also has an online presence – if you wanted to get the product delivered, chances are you’d have ordered it online. Obviously within reason: just because John Lewis sells sofas in-store doesn’t mean I expect to take it home with me.

But take electricals. We wanted to buy a telly. Ideally we wanted to choose one in-store and take it home with us there and then.

Except we couldn’t. No matter which big consumer electricals store on the big soulless retail park in Tottenham we went into, not one had a TV we could take home. You could only order for home delivery – and in any case they’d then advise you to go online to make your purchase to get the online-only price. The shop purported to be a shop, but really it was just a physical window to an online store.

So we went home, sans telly, and ordered it online.

On the day it was supposed to be delivered, it was chucking it down with snow. The country had ground to a halt. So understandably, we thought our delivery might be held up or cancelled.

So I thought it would be prudent to call up and find out if the delivery was likely to be affected by the weather. Except that there was no way I could do this. The automated system didn’t want to deal with any queries that didn’t fit into its allocated boxes. There was no way I could actually speak to an actual human being. I even tried the sneaky ‘press 0 to bypass everything and go straight to an operator’ trick, but to no avail. The system was fully automated and tough luck if you had a query that didn’t fit into the questions it was set up to answer.

As it happened, the delivery van arrived and we got our telly. It’s brill. Its HD goodness is fab for games and blu-ray. Lovely stuff.

But buying it wasn’t. Sometimes we just want a physical shop where we can buy what we went in for, instead of having to wait in all day for a delivery which will obviously right at the very end of the delivery slot.

And sometimes you just want a real human being to speak to about a query. Going through an automated system to get there might be a pain in the arse, but as long as you can get to someone who might be able to help you, it’s just about bearable.

Amazon is said to be considering establishing a high street presence, to allow customers to collect bigger items such as TV and PCs rather than have them delivered (along the lines of the totally awesome Argos reserve-and-collect system). Amazon have denied this rumour, but as more and more high-street retailers shift their business online, it can’t be just me that’s missing the retailer of old where you could actually take the goods home with you.

It’s a salutory lesson that although the digital world is fantastic, and all the shiny new opportunities it presents are exciting and open a wealth of doors, it’s crucial for brands not to forget about the importance of physical experiences with real live human beings.

(cross-posted to the WARC blog)

April 13, 2010 in Brands | Permalink | 1 Comment
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