Choice is great, right? And in a long tail economy, consumers have more of it than ever. But do we sometimes forget that we have the right to create, and not just make choices, when it comes to what we buy?
My partner and I recently decided to go out for dinner at one of Manly’s most renowned seafood restaurants. As foodies we were both very excited at the prospect of an amazing meal, especially because it was ‘free’ – we went armed with a gift voucher worth $250, more than enough to cover the cost of a meal for two.
The evening got off to a fine start, with swift service, a breath-taking view and a well-picked bottle of crisp white, topped off when the manager himself appeared to take our order. After detailed descriptions and his personal recommendations, we made our culinary choices, and settled in to what promised to be an evening to remember.
Jump ahead a couple of hours and we both had full bellies and big grins; the food was exceptional, the service unrivalled, and the evening near on perfect. Our earlier choice – to go out to eat – had paid off.
The bill arrived and to our delight had come to only $150, meaning we’ve have a full $100 left from our voucher, to spend on a return date. Seemingly the night couldn’t get any better.
Which meant that it could only get worse. The manager explained that we would have to spend the entire voucher or forfeit the difference, as the restaurant’s policy meant no cash or additional vouchers could be issued as change.
He gave us three choices – to eat more, drink more, or take a bottle of wine home. But the thought of eating or drinking anything else wasn’t something we were comfortable with.
"A wafer thin mint, sir?"
Luckily I had my beautiful and intelligent partner with me, who immediately responded to the choices presented. “Nope, none of those options work for me”.
I had to hold myself back from laughing, as the manager was obviously taken aback with this response. But then an idea popped into my head, and I realised how both parties could actually win from this situation.
I explained to the manager that it was in fact him who would be making a choice, and presented him with two options.
Option 1
Make us spend the rest of the voucher now, leaving without our money but with a bad taste in our months, a taste that would certainly result in us talking negatively about our experience. We would almost certainly never return.
Option 2
Give us a new voucher for the difference. We would then walk away very happy, actively recommending the restaurant because of the amazing evening we’d had, and because of the manager’s willingness to be flexible and understanding of our predicament.
And to help him further with his choice, I reminded the manager that armed with a new voucher we would have to return to the restaurant, meaning there was a very real chance we would spend more money and more importantly create a new experience from which more positive recommendation and Word of Mouth would be generated.
Marketing is often about consumer choice. Brands provide us with options that ultimately encourage us to choose them. Yet increasingly brands are being face with choices when it comes to how they respond to people, within a social landscape where positive and negative experiences are instantly shared.
Needless to say Garfish is now reaping the benefits of great free Word of Mouth from myself, my partner and everyone else we’ve chosen to tell this story to. Including you.
Next time you’re given a choice by a brand, why not turn the tables? Could you give them a choice instead – determined by your agenda, not theirs?
Asda’s decision to put mothers at the heart of its marketing strategy is no surprise; there is little doubt that as the main shoppers and decision makers for family purchases, this level of insight can be very powerful.
What is commendable is Asda’s willingness to look beyond shopping behaviours to social trends. While appearing to be unrelated these trends often have a profound effect on the nature of a consumer’s bond with a brand, through a broader understanding of their lifestyle. An empathetic appreciation of people and the context within which they live is crucial for any brand hoping to play a role in their lives.
For example, I believe that Helicopter parenting is dying. Over the last couple of years I have scaled back my kid’s extra-curricular activities and now like nothing better than homework-free evenings kicking back with a TV show (and not even an educational one!) and a cuddle. My friends can’t believe it. I was the one always complaining if work wasn’t set or rushing them around to ballet lessons, drama classes and chess club.
The reason? I now think kids’ lives are stressful enough without actively adding to the pressure. Almost every activity came with exams attached, and I now sincerely believe that creating stronger bonds in the home creates a happier, more successful child.
What has this got to do with a supermarket? Everything. I can think of several products, services or communication that could tap straight into that insight and immediately create an emotional link with me. Family fondue night anyone?
It would be interesting however, to know how the sample for the Mumdex panel has been profiled; the assumption being that it’s representative of the existing Asda demographic. If so, caution is needed to avoid the temptation to extrapolate the findings to all mums. No doubt there will be a quarterly release of data that will happily make the pages of the national press; the source simply cited as ‘UK mums’.
Equally has Asda considered identifying those mums on the panel with the most influential clout? In a world where brands need to rely increasingly on Word of Mouth both on and (more crucially for this audience) offline, our research shows that it is a certain type of woman across all social classes who is shaping others’ attitudes and preferences, much more than any form of brand communication. Understanding these women and how, when and where they influence is key, not only to gaining valuable insight into the development of social trends, but also to creating a WOM strategy that goes beyond the mummy blogger and into the real world.
Here at 1000heads we often extol the virtues of using human analysts to derive meaningful insights and recommendations from WOM listening. We also talk about how brands need to be more human when interacting with people in social media (and beyond). For a large organisation to achieve this, and to deal with any customer service issues that arise, there must clearly be some sort of process involved.
But what happens when that process actually makes the humans seem like robots?
Watching the recent Tesco employment story evolve, we saw a well-run and personalised customer service Twitter stream begin repeating the same message to multiple people for hours on end. But regardless of your views on the issue itself something went very wrong with the way Twitter was used to respond to people’s concerns. What’s more, I’ve no doubt that it was a human in charge of the Twitter feed. So what went wrong?
I imagine what we saw here was that Tesco has a prescriptive set of KPIs telling operators how many people they should reply to and a flowchart telling them how to respond in a crisis. These two processes perhaps worked together to make Tesco suddenly appear less human and more like a robotic call centre. Like other Twitter outbursts such as the GAP logo change, this may not have a lasting effect on Tesco’s reputation in the short term. But all brands should remember that human operators are more than capable of appearing machinelike in certain situations. A coordinated, sincere, human response to a situation like this is really hard to pull off, but a modern social business has to aspire to it.
How do you encourage the people running your social presence to come up with a better solution? For me it has to start with measuring the right things. For example, if you measure the % of tweets you are responding to as a success metric, your team is left with no incentive to demand a change to the script when it’s really needed. They’ll just keep on tweeting to hit their quota. It’s the same reason why direct marketing can become labelled as junk mail. The need to hit volumes outweighs the ambition to be targeted and relevant, and brands only entrench themselves deeper when social interactions go wrong.
This problem of blind process getting in the way of delivery has been solved elsewhere. In his excellent book “How to Measure Anything” Douglas Hubbard describes the early days of agile software development, where people measured the speed of work simply because it is an easy thing to quantify and optimise. But when these developers produced a large amount of features that no-one wanted to use, the realisation struck that a gauge closer to a consumer-facing outcome was needed.
So if our supposition is correct the first thing Tesco needs is a shift from speed-of-work based reporting to measurement based on outcomes. In doing so its Twitter team would be empowered with the flexibility to identify an issue and elevate it internally (with the benefit of a linear organisation structure to provide the speed and level of authority needed), which would ultimately allow the brand to respond in a human and empathetic way.
We have an ‘open door’ blogging policy for all staff here at 1000heads and today’s post is from Senior Strategy Executive, Ben Fox, he’s a talented chap and had this to say about a recent not-exactly-social retail experience – JW
Like many twenty-something males in the UK, I’ve always looked to Topman for fashion inspiration. The retail chain took around £1.8 billion in revenue last year and is a market leader because of their ability to influence (rather than simply follow the) trends; a trait that all brands aspire to. This ethos has always stuck in my memory and as a result Topman is front of mind when I want/need new clothes.
However, experience determines perception, and over the weekend I saw a different side to the retailer. I was in-store, browsing through the racks, when I saw the perfect T-shirt for a friend of mine. It was ideal and emblazoned across the front was “It’s all about me”; a running in-joke that we have together.
I took a photo on my phone to send it to him (so we could have a bit of a laugh and see if he wanted it) and to cut a long story short, I was promptly asked by a member of staff to delete the photograph I’d just snapped. I explained what was happening, and that I wanted to send it to a friend, but it didn’t seem to matter. I still don’t really understand why I couldn’t keep the photo, I was simply told to refer to the Topman ‘terms and conditions‘.
Being a disgruntled customer of the 21st century, I promptly tweeted:
Topman can make their own rules, of course. But are these restrictions rules stifling sales?
For a start, they’ve just shut down a direct product recommendation between two trusted peers – a big word of mouth no no. After that, there seemed to be an expectation placed upon the aforementioned peer to go home, remember the product, visit the website, find the product page and then send it on to his friend? Unlikely at best, inconvenient too.
OK, so, sticking to 1000heads’ blogging guidelines and turning this negative into a positive, I’d like to flip this whole policy on its head and create some kind of smartphone-based media sharing campaign for Topman. Without fleshing it out too much, it would basically aim to drive consumers in-store and encourage organic image sharing. I can imagine it being some kind of treasure hunt, using perhaps both Foursquare and Instagram, alongside Twitter and Facebook to push content out to the masses.
Just look at the number of tweets and shares that have driven the competition: 191 and 1175 respectively – that’s not bad at all. The Topman brand has fans that share their content and while it’s not officially related to image sharing, I can’t help the felling that – on the strength of the above - Topman is missing several opportunities to convert positive (and potentially negative) offline retail experiences into online activity.
The Land Rover competition is not inherently social. They’ve done a simple ‘stick a share badge on it’ job and let it go from there. Imagine if they’d actually tapped into something properly and, instead of shutting down P2P recommendation, embraced sharing of in-store content across multiple different platforms?
It could make for a very different story indeed.
To close, it’s worth saying that I still admire Topman, and will do, as long as they keep selling great products. I couldn’t imagine shopping on Oxford Street without visiting their flagship store. But when it comes to engendering positive word of mouth both online and off, they seem to have missed a beat.
Burberry may be ‘the biggest luxury brand in social media’ (thanks to a wide-reaching use of social technologies, its own social network ,and a huge number of fans and followers) but that doesn’t impress as so much as how the brand is using those tools and engaging that community. For example:
“You have to create a social enterprise today; you have to be totally connected with everyone who touches your brand. If you don’t do that, I don’t know what your business model is in five years.”
Burberry has been executing lots of socially switched-on projects over the past few years, for example: Art of the Trench, a crowdsourced photography site where customers share images of their favourite coats; a holographic film immersion for its launch in China; and allowing customers to shop direct from 3D catwalk livestreams and in-store iPads.
In February, Burberry livestreamed their autumn/winter 2011 womenswear show from Kensington Gardens onto the famous 32m screen in Piccadilly Circus - which was viewed by over one million people online in more than 185 countries. And this week the brand continued the trend at London Fashion Week (#LFW) with a detailed social strategy:
premiering its catwalk collection on the ‘Tweetwalk’ so their Twitter followers see the clothes before the actual show
handing Burberry’s fantastic Instagram account over to photographer Mike Kus, the most-followed Instagram user in the UK, for the duration of the show
releasing the show’s soundtrack as an album on the iTunes on-demand service
selling the collection direct for a week after the show on Burberry.com and through ‘retail theatre’ events nationwide
This isn’t wildly innovative stuff, but it is situated in an innovative context – the traditionally closed and elitist world of couture. Burberry evidently refuses to believe that transparency will kill the aspirational desirability of its brand, and persists in democratising its experiences for more than a handful of underfed editors.
Social media has become an integral part of fashion weeks the world over, and we’ve done our bit to help our clients join in. The coup here is that Burberry’s prolific social tactics appear to be genuinely rooted in a commitment to sharing, providing immersive experiences, and putting the everyday fashion lover – not just the moneyed few – at the heart of everything it does.
Now that’s worth raising a lychee martini (or four) to.
Disrupt! Be out of the ordinary! Be human! Surprise! Delight! Think about the offline!
^ Welcome to 1000heads.com. We preach about all of the above and much, much more. When it comes to adopting a human tone of voice, we yell our thoughts and beliefs from the rooftops.
Often we find the best examples of this away from our computers and out on the streets around us. Today, we’d like to show off five awesome examples of randomness that we’ve spotted and/or come up with that have made us smile, sparked a conversation and ultimately, enticed us in-store to make a purchase.
First up, as it’s a Monday, we’ll start with something cute. This sign should read: ‘Kitten for sale’, but it doesn’t, it says this -
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I spotted this one only last night on my way home from work. Inspiration (and humour) is everywhere, you just have to look up.
Next, your bar is closed. First of all, why? Second, how do you communicate it? B@1 has the answer -
These guys are up front about the lack of cocktails on this particular evening and, as fellow hard-working human beings, we totally understand the difficulties giving all of the staff a night off and this communicates it brilliantly. Fair play.
Returning to that journey to and from work, it’s not often you spot furniture just left around in the street. What’s even more infrequent is spotting this kind of note attached:
“I need a new home! I’m a super sofa bed.”
Of this, I am a fan. According to my neighbours this sofa was snapped up within hours of it being left out like this and, even though dumping furniture like this is probably illegal, putting a human face on it all suddenly changes your perspective.
This next one we spotted on Twitter this morning, c/o ‘Professor Snape‘. We don’t know what store this was snapped in but, as creative ideas around empty shelving areas go, this one is definitely one of our favourites.
A big welcome on the blog to our brand new Strategy Exec Josh Bourne. Today he continues our theme of the month, retail, with a look at how the big F is dominating social commerce… ^MF
Let’s go back to the Harvard dorm room days of Mark Zuckerberg. Besides spending hours and hours typing code and designing the look for what was then known as The Facebook, Zuckerberg needed to think hard about why people like you and me would want to log onto his site on a repeated basis.
Fast forward to today, and online publication Social Commerce Today attempts to explain that motivation by looking at seven core Facebook uses and activities. These unsurprisingly include connecting with people; sharing; updating statuses; and investigating people (or “social surveillance”).
But what’s most interesting is that buying from brands and connecting with brands is not included.
Did Mark Zuckerberg realise in his dorm room that The Facebook could be so much more than just a place to connect? That it could, indeed, be a place to buy?
Retailers are realising that making products available to buy for followers of their Facebook pages is a great way to increase awareness of their brand while also earning additional profit; Social Commerce Today also posted an article last month of their top 50 Facebook stores and the top 20 store solutions used to power them.
Take the Facebook page of the movie Batman: The Dark Knight:
Facebook gives users the option of purchasing credits which can be used to buy a variety of products, and The Dark Knight’s social media team takes advantage of this by conveniently allowing followers of the movie to use these credits to watch the movie.
Of course, different stores are used in different ways as different brands offer different kinds of products for purchase…
Here is the facebook store of musician Jason Mraz:
With more than 7.6 million likes, Jason Mraz (and his social media team) used the Bravado store solution to integrate merchandise into his Facebook profile which fans can view and then buy after two clicks.
When Facebook followers engage in social commerce and use Facebook as a means to purchase products from brands they love, success doesn’t go unnoticed.
A New York Times article states that clothing retailer American Eagle has been able to quantify Facebook, or at least show that referred facebook page followers to their website produces measurable results:
“American Eagle saw users referred by Facebook spend 57 percent more than average on the site.”
So the Facebook store examples above provide a glimpse into how companies can use social commerce differently: they can allow users to browse products and then head to the parent website to make a purchase; or customers can buy a product by using facebook credits instead of pounds, euros or any other currency. There are some companies that allow users to purchase products without ever leaving the social networking site, but tit may take a while for others to get comfortable with using their online payment processing systems.
From a word of mouth perspective, companies allowing its customers to purchase their products on a journey that starts with Facebook has big advanatges: it gets your fan base talking about products, recommending them, and connecting with other people in the process, which is where the real ‘ripple effect’ kicks in.
So what do you think? As a business owner or knowing someone with a business, would you recommend using Facebook as a social commerce tool?
This month’s blog theme at 1000heads is retail, and no examination of how social is transforming shopping would be complete without a peek at Walmart.
The US-based retail giant, which Forbes ranked last year as the world’s largest public corporation by revenue, was early to get in on the social act but with infamously varied success – including a networking community called Hub they shut down after 10 weeks and fake blogs created with their agency Edelman.
However, by 2009 Forrester social guru Josh Bernoff seemed to think that they were finally heading in the right direction with a range of effective initiatives including elevenmoms.com, the promotion of on-site recommendations and reviews using Bazzarvoice, and, perhaps most importantly, a shift in management attitudes resulting in “a company open and receptive to embracing and empowering its customers and employees online, regardless of what they end up saying.”
And yesterday things got really interesting with the announcement that Walmart have spent $300 million acquiring social media startup Kosmix, creator of the ‘Social Genome’ platform “which filters and organises social network content and creates profiles of users, products and places”.
The aim is to produce an innovation project called@WalmartLabs, as described by Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajarman:
“We are at an inflection point in the development of ecommerce. The first generation of ecommerce was about bringing the store to the web. The next generation will be about building integrated experiences that leverage the store, the web, and mobile, with social identity being the glue that binds the experience. Walmart’s enormous global reach and incredible scale of operations — from the United States and Europe to growing markets like China and India — is unprecedented. @WalmartLabs, which combines Walmart’s scale with Kosmix’s social genome platform, is in a unique position to invent and build this future.”
We’ve discussed the development of social commerce manytimesbefore, but it is clear that when companies of this size start investing volumes of money that large on combining social, mobile and retail, the resulting alchemy is going to define the way we shop in a pretty short timescale.
They got stuck into social early and they’ve made lots of mistakes; but they’ve weathered the knocks, learnt from them, and keep pushing forwards with bold initiatives when most retailers still think social commerce means selling your daughter to a duke.
Making money from social media platforms without alienating your audience can be a difficult balancing act.
Last Thursday Spotify announced some pretty big changes to its free account structure, the splashiest news being that free accounts would now be limited to 10 hours per month of music and only 5 plays of each song.
As a business decision I feel this is probably a good move for Spotifty. It is losing 16m Euros a year at the moment and advertising revenue is clearly not covering the costs of all those plays made by free users; indeed I don’t think Spotify advertising has taken off at all (it seems to me, as a regular free user, that most adverts are actually for Spotify itself and they are certainly poorly targeted!).
These changes will have three main effects:
Decrease in costs: Free users will obviously play less music, meaning less billing from record companies
Increased revenue: The limiting factors involved in the new model will (Spotify hopes) better push users into paying for the service = more revenue!
Decreased advertising revenue: With the limits on free accounts and with paid accounts free of advertising Spotify is clearly pushing more into a subscription based revenue model where advertising will have less of a role to play
Unsurprisingly there has been an online backlash. People who have become used to getting something for free don’t like suddenly being told “erm, sorry but now you have to pay.” Social media groups like this are inevitable and I am sure competitors like Grooveshark will get a boost from this move, but Spotify is a business. The company’s freemium model was clearly not sustainable so they adapted quickly; good for them.
However, I do feel that Spotify have missed a trick with this change.
Spotify is, largely, a young person’s tool; the core users are people like my 17 year old sister (one of the first people I saw using the service) and her young friends along with students. Now these young listeners often don’t have debit cards or a regular income to pay for a £10 a month subscription and as avid consumers of music will not submit to 5 plays per track and 10 hours a month of music. Some kids may get Mum or Dad to pay for their subscription, but the rest will just go back to piracy or find another service to use.
Looking at the comments on Spotify’s blog and the above Facebook group you can see the problem; here are some choice grabs:
But what’s strange is there is such an easy way to deal with this problem and turn it into a revenue generator.
These type of iTunes vouchers have been around for years and follow the precedent of PAYG phone cards for “top ups” or old fashioned gift cards / vouchers. All Spotify needs to do is distribute a PAYG Spotify card and Spotify gift cards via popular European retailers, maybe even linked to an iTunes-style online purchase element, and market them properly (for a start, using the free Spotify adverts).
Spotify suddenly goes from losing the youth market to converting them into paying customers. Easy, right?
Of course this needs to happen quickly to work, before they all jump ship, but it seems to me it would make the difference between a mass customer defection or embedding Spotify even further into our culture.
It’s a new month and so we embark upon a new theme of conversation for 1000heads.com.
For April, we’ll be sporadically focusing on all things Retail and, as resident sporty-head here at 1000heads HQ, I’ve taken it upon myself to apply some of my usual sports-based thinking to that of the retail world.
Ready? Here we go -
Let’s look at sports teams. Each and every one of them, no matter the sport, all look to make the most of their home games throughout their respective seasons; the increased support, the familiarity of the surroundings, as well as benefiting from the negative factors affecting the opposing away team – all combine to make the home advantage a very real and tangible asset.
It was with this in mind that I started thinking about the recent announcement from NikeTown Boston. To help promote the launch of their new Nike Free Run+2 range of trainers (as well as capitalise on the excitement for the upcoming Boston marathon), NikeTown Boston is creating a series of running-themed events across the city of Boston.
The events themselves will provide attendees with a customized training program, as well as expert training and guided weekly runs on Wednesday evenings. On top of that, guests will get to enjoy complimentary shoe trials, weekly tech sessions and post-run training refreshments, all leading up to the Boston Marathon. Nike created five branded events, with topics ranging from utilising Nike+ technology to keep track of your runs, race day preparation, to developing different stride patterns and working out which one works best for you.
Even though Nike doesn’t have an official relationship with the Boston Marathon, it’s clearly not letting this stop it getting involved with people’s preparation for the big event. And with an event such as a marathon the preparation is the most important part, the ‘on the day’ involvement is minimal, and not likely to have much of an impact on the people taking part.
However, this is not the bit that interests me. What interests me here is that Nike is clearly making an effort to capitalise on their home advantage. Nike knows that its NikeTown stores are pretty impressive retail locations, and different to the average trainer shop.
But by providing social reasons for people to come to the store – above and beyond being a customer – Nike are creating more opportunities for people to have an immersive experience, and benefit from a deeper level of engagement with the brand, the staff, its products and the store itself.
Here at 1000heads we’re always preaching to our clients that every touch point of their business has the potential to be social and conversational, thus making them a potential source of brand advocacy, retail included. Obviously it helps that NikeTown stores are so impressive, but there is definitely something to be learnt for all brands which have a retail presence.
Retail stores are not just a sales channel, a queue for the tills or a scrum for the best bargain. Retail locations can be far, far more than that, and can provide you with a reason to turn the customer into a true brand advocate.
It’s a new month and so we embark upon a new theme of conversation for 1000heads.com.
