Marketing 3.0—Building Great Brands in the Digital Age
MODERATOR:
Amanda Richman, Executive VP, Managing Director of Digital, MediaVest USA
PANELISTS:
Rod Lehman, Senior Director, Americas Marketing, HP Software
Chris Chambers, Director of Digital Marketing, Tourism Queensland
Zdenek C. Kratky, Director of Marketing, Philips Consumer Lifestyle
Chance Parker, VP and General Manager, J.D. Power Web Intelligence, J.D. Power and Associates
This was a “show and tell” session—one of my favorite formats. The panelists began with a discussion on how to convince management in these tough times to shift money to digital to build brands.
The evidence was overwhelmingly in favor. In an HP software campaign, 80% of the people were people who they weren’t talking to before, and 1/3 actually bought something. At Philips 5 years ago digital was the space that needed to be proved. Today, it’s a part of the total engagement strategy, Philips even has had mandates on how much to invest in digital. Social media is a good example. Marketers don’t have to do a lot of convincing, they just have to figure out what to invest in. Yet right now a lot of companies are not convinced about shifting money to social media so they’re not doing it. Industry is trying to “metricize” social media. There is a lot of convincing, and the jury is still out. In reality it’s a combination of measurement and “gut”. E-mail remains the killer app: it still has a 10:1 advantage vs. social networking.
On to the show and tell!
Chris Chambers of Queensland Tourism started things off nicely. Remember “The Best Job in the World” campaign? The challenge to address was that there were not enough people coming down to Queensland. There was lots of fragmented marketing and low awareness as a result, and Queensland needed to tell more of the story in a cohesive fashion. The campaign for the Great Barrier Reef was in market for 2 years to the trade first to prepare for consumer campaign (so when you go to your travel agent they actually know what you’re talking about). The campaign advertised a job blogging about the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef for 6 months with a salary of AUD 150,000, about $140,000, nice work if you can get it! It launched January 11 with a series of small recruitment press placements and a web site in 8 languages. The campaign was in phases to maintain interest with a real teaser effect: applications open, shortlist, wild card voting, interview event, caretaker starts, best experience competition. They narrowed applicants down to 50 candidates, then selected the winner. The campaign got live coverage on BBC and other media. The caretaker started July 1st. Then a “best experiences” campaign followed to win a 7 week all expense paid trip to Queensland.
The results were awesome. 8.4 million visitors to the site, 900,000 in the first few days. 400,000 from Facebook. Average time on site over 8 minutes, 34,680 applications. An equivalent of 390 million AUD ($350 million) of publicity, including Oprah, Time, BBC Documentary, 13 part TV series, 5.9 million views of Queensland content on YouTube. Increased Queensland product in programs, reported increases in visitation from key markets, and valued longer term engagement opportunities.
What were the learnings and benefits?
- Give yourself permission to think big
- The idea alone is not enough, be prepared
- Be honest, transparent and true to your brand
- Have plans not to disappoint your advocates
- Implement solutions which can scale up
- Social networking and digital are now central to marketing
How much was planned? Quite a lot took them by surprise. The expectation for the campaign was that it was a great idea. They thought they would get 400,000 visitors to the site and then had to move from 1 server to 11 servers. 9,000 video applications in the last weekend alone. They were really pleased about the campaign, but had to “let it go”.
Rod Lehman of HP next talked about HP Software. HP is sold on digital media.
For them it’s part of a holistic picture. When HP combines digital with print and traditional they get twice the response over if they do those things individually. However their approach is broader. They have to do digital media then have to follow up with more targeted things on the back end. They’re also doing a lot of social media—not into FB or twitter, more about the brand. Getting 10,000 people on a Facebook page is merely HP talking to customers, business as usual. Viral or refer a friend programs and people forwarding content to Facebook community works better: the trust factor is higher and there’s a better conversion rate. Digital first, other channels later.
HP looked at its engagement model and did a DM piece wihich got 13% response rate. HP uses a high touch approach. They did a telemarketing followup and more. This generated a huge ROMI: HP invested $100,000 and the influence was $2.8M revenue. Strong conversion initially, best in class conversion in the end.
HP also did the Scrawlr viral campaign, in which they created a free trial version of a security product and popularized it by having bloggers in the security space talk about it. WItihin 72 hours they had tens of thousands of downloads. They also got 18 original press articles in traditional media with no press releases from HP.
Zdenek Kratky, Director of Marketing of Philips Consumer Lifestyle was up next. The Stop Brushing/Start Sonicare Campaign had as its objective to grow marketshare by converting manual users to switch to Sonicare. The Consumer Insight? 14% of registered Sonicare users cited friends and family recommendations as the greatest purchase influence; second only to the dental practitioner recommendation. The strategy was to leverage existing Sonicare loyalists to drive word of mouth and make recommendations more easily and effectively
Philips started by creating a Facebook Fanpage supported by paid media to create a community of Sonicare advocates. The quotes were amazing, not only from users but dentists, dental hygienists, etc.
Current results: the campaign generated 14,000+ fans and 1,557 wall posts over a 3 week period; 80% of posts are positive, 20% neutral. Unexpectedly,
17% of the posts were from dental professionals.
After the wow factor of the “show and tell”, Chance Parker of JD Power Web Intelligence offered a more sober perspective.
His advice? Take a step back from tactical things and how you think about social media, moving beyond the buzz.
The conventional wisdom for listening to social media is that it’s for monitoring and threat detection. Most companies get into social media out of fear. Identify a threat before it happens. Think about Domino’s pizza or Starbucks problems. Social media can backfire and amplify those problems. “If I can just watch social media I can defuse the nuclear pizza before it explodes…”
Next, they realize people are out there talking about their brands and companies realize they need to be part of the conversation: this is influence and outreach.
Metrics are a trap, or at least an obstacle. Social media can do great things to help you build your brand but metrics are a trap. If you focus on just measuring you limit yourself on how you can use social media.
For example, the panel before this one was focused on digital moms. We can isolate them, measure the brands they talk about, index them, but we miss a huge opportunity to gain insight about what moms are saying about your brands, and drive innovation.
Turns out there are GenX moms and GenY moms. We can quantify how they talk about diapers, which constitutes (believe it or not) 20% of blog posts. GenX moms have more than one child and are very focused on price. GenY moms are talking about “this is my first kid how can I make him more healthy”—they’ll consider cloth diapers, even making their own. If you focus on the metric alone you miss that.
JD Power also did research on teens. You can miss insights such as when today’s teen turns 16 they don’t look forward to getting a driver’s license. They’ve lived through the struggles their parents lived through. They’re more interested in helping out, in getting a good job to help their families (cars are expensive, after all).
Despite all the cool things, listen and hear. Don’t just listen, hear. There’s a huge opportunity to gain rich insight from what these people are saying. The blogosphere is a focus group of 1 million people. It’s very sincere. Don’t miss the opportunity to listen. It’s unfortunate we refer to it as “media” as that limits us.
So if social is the foundation of marketing 3.0 what else would the panelists like to see next year? Mobile will finally take off (I’m not so sure)… It’s a great opportunity to encourage people to spend longer in destinations. Zdenek Kratky of Philips said “I wish for an increase in consumer spending” (I think we all agree). He also thinks social media is not media, it’s just like walking now, we do it all the time. When you’re not at your computer you have a handheld—it’s ubiquitous. You’re not doing it so people can advertise to you, youre doing it to gain knowledge. Media should do more to push knowledge for consumers. Rod Lehman wishes people would “respect the social media”. How do companies like ours use social media? We should deliver things of value. When I sign up to your Facebook page I form a relationship, I expect something of value—and I will terminate my relationship with you if you just push ads at me.
Chance Parker concluded by saying that he hopes more companies will stop “half-assing” social media. If you’re going to get in the pool, get in the pool, don’t just screw around. If you’re going to half ass it, don’t bother.
Amen.
