Getting your social approach right: protecting your brand from critics

A number of people have asked me this week about how they should prepare their brand for attacks from activist groups who criticise them in the media. I’ll leave the mechanics of crisis management to the legal and PR people who specialise at it – but here are some thoughts on simple things you can do as a brand to make sure you are as ready as you can be.

1. Don’t view advocates for another opinion or worldview as enemies. You may not like what they say, or the manner in which they say it, but, unless they are physically attacking your business, essentially they are competitors (and on occasions even potential allies) – and the reason why they are more like competitors is that they have the potential to take attention, influence and market share away from your brand. So treat them like you would any other competitor: get to know them, get to know what they believe in and the opinions they compete against you on. Draw up a watch list. Keep an eye on their social media. Understand what they stand for in the marketplace. What you can’t do is pretend they’re not there or start engaging with them, either directly or indirectly, once they have done something to get your attention. If you do that, you will always be in catch-up.

2. Draw up a strong and simple set of principles that state what you believe in and link those principles directly to your brand, values and reputation. Those principles should be directly related to the things that you affect and that affect you as a brand socially. Use the “Because … then” connection to establish why you believe what you believe rather than just making apple-pie statements. (See my last post on social responsibility for more details on this.) State those principles openly on your website – and make your principles and worldview a critical part of your induction process, so that your own people understand from the get-go what you stand for. If someone draws attention to something you don’t have a principle on, make a decision quickly about where you stand on that point as it relates to your brand and values, and state that clearly for the record. If you don’t have a position, but you understand you need one, then say so and explain why you haven’t had such a principle up until now. Undertake to establish a principle, put a timeframe round it, and go public once you’ve decided.

3. Once you have a set of principles in place, establish clear measures for how you will ensure you comply with and progress those principles. These measures should be objective, credible, widely recognised and potentially monitored by another party. They show that as a brand you are committed to what you believe and that you operate within a clear metric framework. For example, if you are a beer brand, and one of your principles is that you will be a responsible and sustainable consumer of water, then you need to have measures in place that show what you mean by responsible and sustainable. They could be a globally recognised standard for water purity or a specific group’s recommendation on the amount of water you recycle. They should clearly show where you have purposefully set the bar and on what authority.

4. You need to set in place actions that contribute to you achieving your measures and that correlate directly with the measures you have put in place. These show how you are systematically working to achieve clearly defined and articulated goals. Those measures could include things you do as well as organisations or initiatives you support, research you have underway and aspects of your operations that you are monitoring and/or changing to reach the measures you have set. Such actions are a great way to involve your people internally and can deliver real bottom-line benefits in the way of untapped efficiencies. They also make sure that you continue to operate as a principle-centric organisation.

5. Report succinctly but clearly on what you believe, the frameworks you are using and the progress you are making with actions. It doesn’t have to be a huge CSR report. It could be a page on your website or part of your marketing.

Most of these ideas seem self-evident on reflection but it’s remarkable how many brands do not have a social approach like this in place. What that means is that when they are criticised in the media by an activist brand, they don’t know enough about who they’re dealing with, they don’t have a set of principles they can refer to, there are few or no measures that they can cite and there’s a mad scramble to find the facts as the phone starts ringing and Twitter goes mad.

Everything then comes down to a fight over actions, and a discussion conducted purely at that level is very difficult to win because it quickly becomes ‘they say … we say’ and your brand inevitably comes across as defensive.

You can use a similar Principles – Measures – Actions – Report process for other key aspects of your social brand too, such as your sponsorships. Let’s come back to that …

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Almost every brand I work with has a community policy, an environmental policy, a sustainability policy … as they should. And everyone seems to acknowledge that the policy or policies they have form an important part of their reputation and their stakeholder relations … as they should. And yet precious few brands have actively connected those social responsibility activities with their brand.

They haven’t yet capitalised on extending their brand story to encapsulate those critical social elements.

Which is weird.

Instead, they have treated their brand and their social responsibility policies as entirely separate company matters. And I think the reason why is that many companies view their community relations or their environmental approach as corporate and/or compliance issues. They simply don’t see that those issues are intrinsically linked to the opinions and values of their brands.

So while they can often spell out clearly what policy they have, they often don’t spell out why they have the policy they have. And they often don’t look for ways to differentiate that policy from what others are saying in ways that are authentic to them (which is why so much of what companies talk about when they talk about CSR matters all sounds the same). Instead they often look to throw credentials at the issue by citing the standards they are meeting or the accreditations they have earned or bought.

The irony of this is that time and time again, we’ve seen brands take a hammering because a company is not seen to have met its social responsibility standards. So there is definitely a case to be made for brands monitoring their social responsibility behaviours. And there is definitely an appetite for ethical purchase.

Knowing this, I would suggest that these historically separated matters of brand and social responsibility policy need to be much more closely integrated. The thing is, it really makes sense for a brand to carry its beliefs through into its social responsibility platforms. And there is a clear opportunity for “Because … then” sequencing that so often seems to go missing.

Because we believe [this] as a brand, we are committed to [this] socially/ environmentally/ communally …

For example, if I managed a chocolate brand centred on good ingredients, I would look for ways to directly link that ethos to social, environmental or communal policies that are centred on protecting or ensuring goodness or integrity.

My argument might go something like this: “Because we’re obsessed with making the best chocolate in the world, we’re committed to sourcing the best ingredients in the world. Which is why we insist on ingredients that are grown …” You get the idea.

But I wouldn’t stop there. I would also evaluate the social responsibility policies that the company has in the light of the brand commitments I was making to see whether in fact, they are consistent and distinct. To make sure that the actions and the words do in fact align – and that the policy is not just that: textbook statements (platitudes) that could have come out of the mouth of any brand.

Question: How does what you’re marketing align with what you’re doing and supporting?

When you can answer that, it seems to me, you have a branded social responsibility policy that is so much more powerful and differentiating than citing standards. It makes what you stand for as a brand consistent with how you behave and why you behave the way you do. It makes your position so much more principled, coherent and defendable. And it gives you real reputational metrics to examine the rationale and the effectiveness of what you’re doing in the social arena.

Are you indecisive? I’m not sure …

Edward Boches pointed me in the direction of this thought-provoking article by John Tierney on “decision fatigue”. Decision fatigue happens when ordinary people are asked to make decision after decision after decision. Such processes run down the mental batteries that power our self control. Eventually it seems, we start looking for shortcuts – either by acting impulsively or by opting to do nothing.

Research on what tires us out the most shows that people would rather compare and contrast options (without making a decision) or verify a decision that has already been made by someone else than make the decision themselves. Once consumers reach a certain level of mental tiredness they stop negotiating. Instead, they make decisions based on the thing that is most important to them. Decision fatigue, it seems, breaks down our reluctance to explore or commit. People soon opt for default settings or suggestions. And the more tough choices there are early in the process, the quicker people opt for the path of least resistance.

All of this has major implications for the ways that brands think about their ranges and their sales processes – specifically, the intensity of choices, timing of those choices, frequency of choices; types of choices (defaults vs calculations) and simplicity of choices.

There are also important compromises to consider. For example, whilst it might be easy to fatigue someone into making a one-off sale by wearing them out with decisions, what will their experience be in retrospect and will that sale engender loyalty and repeat business and/or WOM? Probably not.

For brands ranging from consultancies to retail, there are important way-finding opportunities in these findings: revealing the complexity/scope of what’s available, for example, needs to be tempered by actions that lead people directly to the things they are most enthusiastic to consider and feel in control of.

My clear take-out from this article is that choice can be a complicator not a liberator, that not all decisions matter enough to involve the consumer (but the secret lies in knowing which ones do), and that speed of transit through the sales process needs to be interlaced with feelings of control, excitement and reassurance.

In other words, the sales process for most brands should change gears to become easier the closer one gets to purchase, with the hard decisions timed to be far enough in for people to feel involved, but not so far in that they feel exhausted.

It’s certainly something to consider the next time you’re looking to change your sales process. Are we asking consumers to make the right decisions about our brands at times that are right for them – or are we pushing them to conform with a way of selling that suits our own energy levels?

The opportunity of dull

There are days when Alex really makes me laugh. I grinned merrily at her observation recently that if you really want to make significant changes as a brand, you should go all out and look for something … dull. That’s right, find something uneventful, even pedestrian – and poke it for opportunities.

And the reasons, on reflection, are simple. Chances are people do whatever it is often. So it comes with scale and frequency. And secondly, if it’s that tedious, frankly the only way is up. High energy, exciting activities already have high EQ by their very nature. And they attract the most interest from brands. So the chances of doing anything breakthrough are so much harder. Dull stuff is out of the limelight. It’s dull and it stays dull for most people until someone does something to change that.

So it’s actually a lot less difficult to make the boring better: to take something that people don’t want to do or don’t enjoy doing, and to inject new elements and ideas that surprise and delight. Wii made exercising at home fun by combining it with gaming. Obvious on reflection – but it sure the hell works. Apple makes shopping appealing (even for men) by giving even those who aren’t into IT something physical, fashionable and beautiful to fidget with. They understood that many people were completely turned off by computer stores – so they went out of their way to make shopping for their stuff feel as ungeeky (and yet as clubby) as possible.

What brands should be looking for, according to Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog Design, is not so much the big pain points as what he terms “tension points”: those things that are annoying or less than perfect but not big enough to be considered problems. He cites the example of Dutch Boy Paint which introduced a Twist & Pour container featuring an easy twist-off lid and a neat-pour spout. It did away with the need to pry open the lid with a screwdriver and reduced spilling and dripping. Read the article. It’s very good.

But often brands can take this further than answering problems. They can develop ways of thinking about what they do that challenge disinterest at every level – because that’s the real issue. That’s the brand-killer.

And the systemic question that gets you there is this: “What’s the most boring thing we do?”

Fix that. Find ways, using techniques such as those that Williams has suggested, to make whatever it is more interesting – for you, for others and most importantly for customers.

Then ask the same question again. And fix the next thing the same way.
It could be the way the phone is answered, or the state of toilets. It could be the fact that there are no plants in reception. Or the forms people need to fill in. Little things that everyone does that are boring but deemed necessary. Because dull is usually small. And the great thing about little is that it makes things do-able. Quickly.

Your goal as a brand is to be fascinating at every level for the people you are trying to reach. That won’t make you Apple or Diesel of Chanel necessarily – but it will make you a lot more attractive and compelling than your competitors. It will enable you to ‘brand’ an activity, however menial, your way.

So often companies look to achieve competitive advantage by building better things and making efficiency gains. But from a brand perspective, you don’t become more interesting or likeable through continual improvement. You can if you commit to becoming more exciting.

Is Google mad?

No-one can accuse Google of resting on its laurels. But having sought to shape-shift the social universe with Google+, what to make of the decision to acquire Motorola? Are patents the latest tech bubble? This post on Business Insider certainly raises some doubts about the prudence of Google’s decision, saying basically that unless they’re in it to strip the intellectual goodness of the patents and run, this is a Time Warner-AOL re-run in the making.

The key concerns are:

The discrepancy in margins and profit ceilings between the two companies, with Google in a league of its own in online advertising and Motorola an also-ran in the low-margin frenzy of hardware manufacture. The common descriptor of “technology” is not enough to hold together two companies that are so disparate in their outlooks, priorities, philosophies and outputs.

Motorola will distract resources, time and attention. Without that, Motorola’s returns will quickly drag on the Google balance sheet.

And my own question – How does much of the rest of the mobile world which uses Android react to such a move? Isn’t there a real risk of cannibalisation here?

All of these points speak to a lingering disquiet on my part, which echoes the “diversification” strategies of the late 80s. Back then, the way to make money, common wisdom declared, was to broaden your revenue streams and/or asset strip and hock off the parts. All sorts of businesses poked their noses into sectors that were quite literally none of their business – often with disastrous results. My concern is that the “war of the worlds” will send tech companies down a similar route – delving into areas of the sector that they are not equipped, physically or psychologically, to maximise in the bid to land-grab whatever seems valuable.

If that happens, expect wreckage. Because one brand’s assets can rapidly become another brand’s liabilities if the set-ups and systems are calibrated incorrectly. Marrying a high-touch, high margin business with a low-touch, low margin business looks like a conflict of interests waiting to happen.

The question for Google is: do you really know what you’re looking for in this, and, ironically, will you find it?

Critical mass: understanding what drives fluctuations in likeability for brands

Whilst I continue to question the financial returns from social media for brands, there is no denying their ability to galvanise. In fact, social media is the driving force behind “critical mass” – the ability to bring together consumers from many places to form a significant mass of opinion, in support or against, based around an issue they consider critically important to them.

For brands, critical mass can be a powerful forum for advocacy, feedback, testing, support and, perhaps most importantly, a way to stay directly attuned to what Mr and Mrs Consumer are feeling. But a critical mass also makes for a powerful enemy: as we’ve seen this past week, a group of people united by a single idea can turn on a brand with extraordinary ferocity.

Critical masses flock and disperse in response to ideas. People join, leave and link at whim. So these groupings are constantly forming, dissolving and reforming on a global scale. They are not one constituency. And the density of the mass and its duration derives directly from the galvanising strength of the idea, the momentum it gathers, and the response of the brand. These are instant opinion communities that can choose to express themselves as pages, groups, in the wider media or directly through a blizzard of tweets.

Social markets, just like their financial counterparts, are driven by sentiment and the interactions of many. And it is that participation that generates volatility. But unlike the sharemarket, critical mass drives partiality rather than actual value. It helps decide whose on your side and whose not – at any given moment.

For scaled brands, then, the sentiment of critical mass represents your likeability in real time.

Some days your partiality will be up – meaning people generally feel good about you. At other times, the mass of opinion will be negative, impartial or absent. Same for your competitors.

Understanding that, quantifying it and responding to it is significant for its importance and yet it can only be momentary in its interpretation.

Time to rethink the business model of some NGO brands?

Brands like Toms with their “one for one” shoes programme have proven that companies can be both profitable and philanthropic. So why do so many NGO brands stick with a funding model that relies on, well, charity?

Peter Salmon, MD at social innovation company NextPlays, certainly has his doubts about models based on grants and donations as opposed to “financed” business practices. Here are some of his thoughts on why “cause” brands need to stop begging for money and start putting up business cases for financing social change.

The current models of financing social organisations are through philanthropic grants, equity investment, or conventional debt financing, he says, but the dominance of foundation and philanthropic grants creates an ineffectual social innovation sector that delivers poorer outcomes.

1. Both financing and grant approaches require well researched documentation but a grant application requires a proposal, whereas financing requires a business plan. These may seem like subtle differences, but one is far more open to innovation than the other. Grant applications are often judged to fit within already pre-determined social development agendas, such as child poverty, or education. So organisations looking for grants end up tailoring their submissions to fit within the scope of the funding rather than focusing on how to get to the real outcomes. Financing has no such agenda. It judges the business plan on the quality of the value proposition, character of the entrepreneur and the likelihood of enterprise success. Financing doesn’t pre-select approaches, it determines likelihood of success.

2. Grant based social development agendas can also foster duplication of effort. This results in the funding of a number of proposals all loosely working in the same area of development, with each striving to achieve at times similar goals with similar structured organisations, resource and funding requirements. Finance applications by contrast are judged on the likelihood that the business plan will succeed. This requires the plan to clearly articulate the unique characteristics of the venture compared to its competitors aiming to serve the same customers or beneficiaries. Proving an enterprise worthy of financing is tough, but toughness requires innovation.

3. Grant based applications place emphasis on well researched understanding of the problem and likely solution, that if successful, leads to operational design of that solution. The process looks like this:

Problem ➔ Solution ➔ Grant ➔ Business model

This is counter to modern approaches to innovation. Larry Keely of Doblin Group has statistically measured that ’98% of all innovations continuously improve known solutions’. That is, they don’t try to create new solutions outright, but improve on what we already have. He goes on to state that some of the greatest innovation breakthroughs have come from using networks in new ways, and rethinking business models.

If this is the modern reality then Salmon says we need to take new approaches to social innovation and funding. More like this:

Problem ➔ Solution & Social Enterprise Model ➔ Financing

Organisations can’t leap directly to solutions without considering how that solution or enterprise will function. More time needs to be spent considering the social enterprise model prior to any form of funding application and what role the community plays within the business.

4. Finally there is the issue of financial sustainability. Grant funded not-for-profit brands can only keep working as long as the grant itself, so they spend a good deal of resources on continually seeking new grants and other fund-raising activities at the expense of focussing on the outcome they seek. A recent survey by Grant Thornton on ‘Financing Non-for-Profits’, stated that financing was one of the three greatest challenges facing the Charitable sector, and achieving their stated social goal ranked on average at seven.

Successful social enterprises, Salmon says, have the ability to generate income alongside achieving their social mission or outcomes, and profits generated beyond that can be reinvested into expansion or future development.

So why aren’t more brands interested? After all, this approach makes the business case for change that more and more sponsoring brands are asking for in their dealings with community organisations.

I suspect it’s because social innovation falls between the cracks.

For the more traditional NGO sector, who are often motivated by their cause, money is the means to what they perceive as the realistic goal, which is progress. This is also a sector that struggles at times to put commercial metrics around their work – so the social enterprise model looks suspisciously like commercialisation (read perhaps exploitation) of a situation. Such a model is highly disruptive to the philanthropic approach they are used to and geared for, and could therefore be seen as unnecessarily distracting in terms of its priorities.

For the for-profit sector, social enterprises aren’t created with commercial profit in mind, but rather for social outcomes – so that means returns don’t fit a conventional risk/reward curve, putting them at odds with the expectations of most investors. Many brands in this space believe their CSR work is commitment enough.

It will be interesting to see who starts building the bridges between these traditionally-different approaches first: NGOs looking to put their organisations on a more reliable business footing; or profit-motivated brands looking for new ways to engage with politicised consumers?

Don’t be disappointed: why price underwrites the brand experience

What’s the difference between a budget airline and a pig? Pigs fly more often – and on time. Harsh perhaps, but it’s a reminder that in a market, there is always a price to pay, and the price is not just about money down.

Some people will be happy with budget. It’s worth a cancelled flight or two for the savings they make. For others, that’s far too high a price to pay for a few dollars saved.

Years ago, I was in a workshop where three people in the group were asked to make the business case for luxury over economy. The team made their case in a pointed and dramatic way.

First, they invited the wider group into a huge open sunny space, where sofas were laid out. Each person was escorted to a sofa and provided with bubbles and canapes. There was a sign on the wall that read $3000. Then, we were invited into a second room. This room was smaller, and instead of couches there were seats. Each person was asked to sit where they wanted and they were provided with a cup of coffee and a magazine. The sign on the wall read $1000. Then we were pushed and hussled into a third room. It was dark and small, with no outside windows, and instead of chairs we sat at school desks all bunched together in one corner of the space. Each person was told where to sit and all they were given was a glass of water. The sign on the wall read $500.

When we returned to the workshop meeting room, there was a simple question waiting for us. It read: Which room would you rather pay to spend 12 hours in – and why? Then we were asked: Which room would you rather pay to spend 2 hours in – and why?

You can imagine the discussion.

Each person will trade off what they get vs what they pay as they see fit. Some would rather fly on the plane and stay in an economy hotel no matter what the length of the journey. Others will want the reverse. And that model transposes almost everywhere you look. The main cinema vs the gold lounge. The budget burger vs the gourmet burger. Supermarket vs deli. The cheap perfume vs the eau de Cologne. Environmental vs irresponsible.

And no-one will do this uniformly. The days of the holistically budget buyer or luxury buyer are gone. Depending on what’s important to us, we’ll shift between budget, standard and luxury in most of our purchases.

That makes understanding what we are getting for our money even more important.

The key point for brands is that they need to make it very clear to their customers what the trade-offs are. Most don’t. They don’t carry storylines that explain why consumers are paying what they’re paying and why they’re getting what they pay for. They sell an aspiration – which of course is a key aspect of marketing – but it is an uninformed aspiration because they often don’t position price as an expectation indicator. They still see it, and treat it, just as a cost.

In the context of branding though, price is more than what goes in the till when the product walks out the door.

Price, when it is talked about, should be the clear and present underwriter of the experience. Chanel shouldn’t ever seem cheap. If it is cheap, it’s a fake. Walmart shouldn’t seem expensive. Neither should Coke.

If your price is right, your story is clear and your service is delightful, appropriate and framed to that price, no customer should ever walk away from the brand disappointed. They may walk away for another reason – because they’ve shifted their priorities or they can’t afford what they once had – but if they walk away disappointed, there’s only two conclusions.

People didn’t get what they thought they were paying for.

And if you don’t set that expectation, they will – which means, it may not align with what they’re actually getting.

Everything to no-one

Great question by Paul Dunay: Is sentiment making brands stupid? As the writer points out we are increasingly obsessed with using monitoring tools as virtual tea leaves to try and read the sentiment of the markets towards our brands. Mentions have become the new money – and machines now break those mentions down into chunks of data and attach a ranking to them that brand managers read as gospel.

But, Dunay argues, the premise is a false one because “most people can’t agree on the spirit or intention of a tweet anyway and they never will”, meaning brands could be giving greater credence than warrented to metrics that are easily lost in translation.

The direct risk from such an approach is that brands essentially treat social media as polling booths for their strategy, and are then unduly influenced in their thinking by the flood of opinions ebbing and flowing across the social universe.

It’s important to listen, we’re all agreed on that, but if brands then look to appease everyone and to compromise and tailor their offerings to suit, they will risk becoming everything to no-one.

Last week on my Facebook page:

Some of the things I’ve been linking to and talking about over on my Facebook Page this last week:

1. Steinlager looks for ways to challenge Heineken around the RWC without breaching the sponsorship rules
2. The decision by Kraft to split their brand portfolio points to a two-speed approach
3. Perhaps China’s imitation of successful Western brands is as much cultural as competitive
4. Whitney Houston asks ‘What job does social media do for you?”
5. Good reading from McKinsey on why we’re all marketers now
6. How companies are using trademark registration to gather brand intelligence long before offerings hit the market