Wine in Australia

So here goes another of my old presentations. This was a presentation for my International Business Course in the beginning of my MBA. Just thought I’d share this with the rest of you all.

Coca Cola Facebook Strategy

I was going through some old files (Laptop Housekeeping) and stumbled across this old presentation I made for my consumer behavior class.

Red Bull Gives You Wings

I #LOVE Red Bull’s marketing campaigns. Everything they communicate, everything they put out there can be tied to one central idea. be it dumping empty Red Bull cans outside prominent parties as a guerrilla marketing tactic or being associated with every adrenaline spiking, heart thumping, ‘Energy‘ based activity. (More on their marketing strategy here.)

I saw this commercial online and fell in love with it. It is minimalistic – no body is shouting at me to buy this product. It is encompassing – I almost felt a spike in adrenaline watching this ad and imagining being there.

Whoever worked on this commercial. You have my respect!!!!!!!!

Brands and Social Media Carelessness – The Nissan Example

Social Media channels have a ‘delete’ button. Does that mean Brands use the delete button and go through as many iterations as possible to get the right message across?

The ability to ‘delete’ mistakes does not imply the freedom to make mistakes.

Lets say a company posts about their latest campaign and misspells a word changing the meaning altogether. Should the company then apologize and correct or ‘delete’ the mistake hoping nobody noticed.

What about if a consumer notices the mistake by the brand and tries to correct it. what is the right thing to do? should the brand delete the mistake and the comment on it and start as if it was a new baby diaper or should it acknowledge the suggestion by the consumer at some level?

Nissan Canada launched a ‘Rear-Seat comfort concept‘ and were promoting it through their digital channels.

This was their post on January 25th 2012, 9:28 AM. My comment 59 minutes later (10:27 AM).

Now I love this brand and thought I’d let them know about this. this post slipped my mind after that day and life got busy. I noticed this picture today when I was cleaning out my desktop and decided to see what Nissan had done about this. I was intrigued as I did not receive any notifications or even a simple ‘Thank you’. A free car would have been nice too but I was just expecting acknowledgement.

This is the post on their page now, revised, without a blink.

Question:

How should brands react if their social media campaigns give the exact opposite message that needs to be conveyed? Should they be ‘Delete-Button-Happy” and get their message across in iterations?

When Brands spend millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours proof reading their statements, TV and print campaigns - Why should social media be delegated to an intern high on caffeine with a smart phone and knowledge of the Delete Button?

Would Nissan’s management be OK if this mistake was in their print ads any leading national newspaper?

Would the Board be happy to hear this mistake being said out loud in their commercials?

What about their billboards?

If they think these would’ve been a nightmare and would never happen because of quality control, Why does it happen in Social Media?

Balzac’s Coffee

Ever since man discovered coffee beans, he has tried his best to improve the concoction. If you are in Toronto and crave for the perfect cup of coffee with the perfect ambiance to enjoy it in, you must find yourself in Balzac’s Coffee in the distillery district.

How good is their coffee you ask? It is so good that I doubt if they drank this instead of wine during the last supper. So good that I fear it might start a war between countries that have it and countries that don’t. It is so good that I wonder if Starbucks Management have surveillance on Balzac to track its success. I swear I saw some shifty eyes and some camera’s the last time I went there.

As an MBA (Marketing) student, I have been taught to observe the intricate aspects of the experience that defines the brand. So What defines Balzac’s Cafe?

First it is the smell. Regulars at the Distillery district would often find a full-grown man floating in the air drawn to the smell of perfectly roasted and brewed coffee. I swear I feel a couple of pounds lighter every time I smell the heavenly aroma.

And then you step into the café to be transformed into another era. Right from the decades old posters to the antique coffee grinders to the chalkboard menu – everything screams of the perfect getaway café. My perfect spot in the Distillery District café is upstairs on the landing – cut off from the first floor overlooking the ground floor, it is the perfect place for coffee and people watching.

It is a shame that its market awareness is bordering dangerously low. It is frequented by people with offices in the distillery district and some tourists who stumble across the café looking for a cup of java. It is not an alternative to Tim Hortons or Starbucks.

Balzac is a Destination Brand

Balzac’s Cafe operates in a whole different league and should be branded as a destination brand. People travel miles for a Tiffany’s store or even the 360 restaurant on CN tower for the experience and the destination. Balzac has the potential to be a destination coffee café but it needs more market awareness. Can’t wait for the new stores in downtown Toronto.

Their recent influx of marketing for this great chain has been due to its pitch in Dragons Den on CBC.

You can find the video of the pitch here.

I do believe that there are good times ahead for my favorite café with Diana Olson working with Arlene Dickinson of Venture Communications & Bruce Croxon of Lavalife. I would love to see Balzac’s being transformed into a destination brand for its customers to look forward to.

Balzac’s need to have their marketing strategy defined and in place. Everyone wants to be associated with a café with heritage. Starbucks has been well-known to pull off some of the best media campaigns (I’ve written about it in my earlier posts – 1, 2.) to create awareness – not that it needs any, and to attract new customers who would one day become loyal brand advocates.

With the budget constraints of a small operation (Balzac’s sale are $ 3.2million), it would be wise to design an integrated marketing campaign that uses social media to create a buzz around the destination and follows it up with some in-store campaigns. I am sure that once consumers visit the store they would become repeat customers. The question is how do we create awareness to drive people to Balzac’s Coffee Roasters?

Superbowl 2012 Commercials – Budweiser has the Lead

One of the best commercials are those that elicit an emotion from the viewer. This campaign by Budweiser does just that.

Brings emotions, creates communities and advocates. Whoever worked on this, I salute thee.

10 Great Magazine Ads That Don’t Just Sit There Looking Pretty

<This is a re-post of a great post on adweek. No commercial intentions behind it.>

1

Hit the front end of the Peugot on the opening page, and an actual airbag inflates on the spread inside. Ad agency Loducca made 50,000 of these things for a Brazilian magazine.

The Talking Ad2

QR codes got dictators talking in a recent print ads from the free-press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. You scan the QR code with your iPhone, then place the phone over the leader’s mouth. The mouth starts talking—but it’s the voice of a journalist discussing media censorship in that country.

The Solar-Powered Ad3

This print ad promoted green energy by being solar-powered itself. In the magazine, it’s just a black-and-white sketch. But held up to sunlight, it blossoms into full color.

The Bottle-Opener Ad4

Follow the instructions on this ad, and you can use the flimsy piece of paper to open a bottle of Carlsberg. Useful!

The Edible Ad5

Volkswagen cooked up a lovely little ad you can eat, and placed it inAuto Trader magazine. The ingredients are listed on the side as “glutinous rice flour, water, salt, propylene glycol, FD&C colour, glycerine.” OK, kind of gross.

The Bra-Tightening Ad6

This Wonderbra ad lets you do a little imprompu boob cinching—a nice little pick-me-up when you’re in the middle of a boring article.

The Bubble-Gum Ad7

Simple and fun.

The Test-Drive Ad8

This Norwegian ad for Volkswagen showed a long stretch of road (in summer and winter versions) and told readers to download an app that lets you “drive” a car on the road by hovering your iPhone over it. You could test three different features of the vehicle—lane assist, adaptive lights and cruise control.

The Sunbather’s Ad9

Just what you need—a suntan-lotion ad that comes with a handy way to completely cook your face off.

The Sticky Ad10

A fertility clinic in Australia placed an ad in FHM that caused the magazine’s pages to stick together. When unstuck, the pages revealed a woman posing in lingerie, along with the line, “Don’t waste your sperm.” The message being—donate it at the Repromed fertility clinic instead.

Positioning in Social Media

Social Media has changed the rules of engagement. This presentation takes a step back and looks at Positioning in the new world.

Starbucks Social Media Strategy

The Starbucks Brand

Starbucks has always been a premium coffee café with an ambience that provides a sense of luxury and opulence to the act of consuming coffee. Starbucks also believed in letting the product speak for itself and spent only $10 million on advertising during 1987-97. Everything from the store environment to the white paper cups with the prominent logo is a result of deliberate research projecting the Starbucks Brand image at the consumers. The stores were chosen based on extensive study of traffic flow density. The décor of the café’s are picked from a catalog created by Wright Massey specifically for Starbucks that give the ambience a ‘similar yet different’ look while maintaining the brand image. Every Starbucks store is unique in its way yet projects the same brand image of a plush, opulent and relaxed atmosphere. It also has its own drink nomenclature.

Starbucks steadfast adherence of its basic theme “Starbucks coffee equals romance, relaxation and luxury” has made it synonymous with those concepts transforming a cheap commodity into “a sophisticated coffee indulgence”.

Its mission has been to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.

Target Audience has always been educated, refined, fashion conscious, ability to appreciate coffee, seeking individuality, moderate-high income. The audience is looking to enjoy the experience and get inspired.

Starbucks and Social Media – The Positive

In 2008, Starbucks created its first social media website to listen to its consumers and engage them in creating memorable experiences at the stores due to a drop in revenues. The site – “MyStarbucksIdea.com” was instrumental in listening to the consumers and engage them before Starbucks launched a facebook page. The site invited customers to contribute ideas by posting to a discussion board where other customers would debate their merit, suggest improvements to the ideas, and vote them up or down. A total of 75,000 ideas were contributed, from which the company chose to implement one hundred, including the complementary WiFi, the ability to buy a friend a beverage remotely, and splash sticks to block the hole in coffee cup lids.

Starbucks’ launched its Facebook page in January 2009 and complemented it with twitter, Flickr and YouTube. By June 2009, the Facebook page had close to 3 million ‘likes’. Starbucks tries to create / share content that the consumers would find attractive and engage with the company. Starbucks uses coupons, special offers and discounts to encourage the consumers to ‘like’ its page on Facebook. This is an excellent way to incentivize consumer engagement.

The content of Starbucks had evolved over the time from brand building to consumer promotion. The content posted on Facebook ranged from information about the latest flavor offerings to webisodes of its new instant coffee, from photos of and by Starbucks customers at their favorite locations to discounts at their favorite locations.

Starbucks ran a promotion in March 2010 on twitter and Facebook called ‘Free pastry Day’ that offered its consumers a free pastry if they present a coupon that had been only posted online. There was also a wave effect with the coupon since the coupon was passed around and shared online. That week Starbucks obtained an extra 200,000 fans on Facebook and later overtook Coke to be the top brand on Facebook. Later that year Starbucks partnered with Yahoo, Foursquare and LinkedIn to enhance its content offering at the stores. However Starbucks’ engagement numbers vary drastically – (high when there is an offer by Starbucks online, low otherwise). Starbucks this day has startlingly low engagement numbers. The engagement rate is only calculated to 0.28% Likes and 0.02% comments

Starbucks approached Social media from a “What do consumers know and love about Starbucks” and succeeded in engaging the consumers not just to promote the brand but to create the unique experience that we know of today. Starbucks customers from a very active and passionate tribe, its location based promotion incentivizes tribal Behavior.

Starbucks and Social Media – The Negative

As with many large corporations, there is a significant negative sentiment towards Starbucks due to various reasons like fair trade coffee, its prices, employee policies and sometime even the service that it prides itself on. The tribal behaviors of the passionate consumers are countered by an equally passionate tribe who disagree with Starbucks. Websites like “www.ihatestarbucks.com” are one of the leading websites that disagree with Starbucks and have users posting their grievances online.

Starbucks also has to listen actively to any news depicting the operations inappropriately. Starbucks had been criticized for its Ethiopian Coffee Deal, Fair Trade, employee policies and monopolizing the communities and harming local economy.

Starbucks is known to have a well placed system of listening to its consumers online. There have been examples of Starbucks employees correcting misconceptions about it and restoring the customers faith and satisfaction. Starbucks wants to be knows as an organization that is inspiring people, one cup at a time. The passion with which Starbucks is mentioned online proves that people are inspired. While Starbucks is mentioned once every 10 seconds, its product Coffee is mentioned once every 35,282 seconds. This shows that the brand of Starbucks is still going strong. Starbucks response to most of the allegations and negative sentiments are met with either a press release, a reply online or a change in policy.

“I Hate Starbucks” – Websites

• www.ihatestarbucks.com: This is the most prolific forum for people to express their issues against Starbucks. They however do not expect Starbucks to address these issues and sometime delete the posts that Starbucks employees create. This can be classified as a purely listening channel. The home page has a cloud of Tags that might give an idea about the sources of issue.

• http://www.ineedcoffee.com/06/hate/ : This is primarily a website about Coffee aimed at educating the consumer about the taste, origin, the business and the brewing of Coffee. They promote local coffee shops with information and recopies and their issue with Starbucks is that Starbucks monopolizes any area it is in and causes local coffee shops to lose business.
• stopstarbucks.com : This channel is primarily by Starbucks employees and their grievances.
• www.spacehijackers.co.uk/starbucks/
• www.starbucked.com

There are a number of Facebook pages created by irate customers providing a forum for others to share their experiences and in a way grow their tribe.

Location based Monitoring

The Majority of the immediate sentiments are expressed through micro-blogging and is generally done so close to the Starbucks store, right after their experience. Starbucks should have a system of addressing them based on location. Most of the posts are tagged based on their location. A team in Toronto monitoring Tweets about Starbucks from the GTA and surrounding areas. A response with free coffee for another chance at great service within minutes of consumer’s complaint might convince them to go back. They say the only thing better than having no complaints is having solved all complaints. The location based monitoring would divide the plethora of tweets into manageable number for the teams to monitor. It would also provide us with some metrics on performances & customer satisfaction based on location.

Managing Consumer Perceptions

There are multitudes of tools available for monitoring social media that provide the sentiment and the key word cloud. These are important benchmarks in finding out the associations of the brand in consumer opinion and cross reference it to the associations they envisioned as per their brand platform.

Starbucks, with all the negative tribes has managed to create core associations that the brand had planned for. Starbucks is adept at listening to its consumers online and to an extent contributes to the conversations and tries to correct any misrepresentation online. It listens to its consumers through the regular channels and created its own channel for consumers to voice their opinions and engage with the brand.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

1.  Radian 6 (http://www.radian6.com/) : It helps monitor Brand mentions across the social landscape and offers an end-to-end presence management tool. It also integrates with existing tools of the organization like salesforce & Google Analytics.

2. SAS Canada (http://www.sas.com/offices/NA/canada/) : Provides a tool for business analytic & consolidates social monitoring on one dashboard with great insights & analytic options.

3. Addict-O-matic (http://addictomatic.com/)
4. Social Mention (www.socialmention.com)
5. Steprep – Reputation Intelligence (http://www.steprep.com/)
6. Twazzap (http://www.twazzup.com/)
7. Sysomos (http://www.sysomos.com/)
8. Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com)
9. Beevolve (http://www.beevolve.com)
10. Seesmic (https://seesmic.com/)
11. PostRank (http://www.postrank.com/)
12. Social Seek (http://socialseek.com/app/home)
13. Social Pointer (http://www.socialpointer.com/)
14. Board Tracker (http://www.boardtracker.com/)
15. Tweetdeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/)
16. Lithium (http://lithium5.com/)
17. Brandwatch (http://www.brandwatch.com/)
18. Mention Mapp (http://mentionmapp.com/)
19. Wildfire (http://www.wildfireapp.com/)

Ubuntu 11.10 – Brands of Fame

What do you think are the best brands out there? Those that spend millions of dollars on the design of the logo or those that end up acquiring every competitor in the market?

It is the brand that makes you smile when you use it. It might not be perfect, It might not even be the best out there, but it has to connect.

Today Marks the launch of Ubuntu 11.10

For those of you who have been brainwashed not to recognize anything other than Windows or Mac, Ubuntu is a Linux based, open source operating system. It is the Luke Skywalker to the WinMac Empire.

It is completely free (Yes, Legally free.) and has some of the most advanced customization’s you can think of.

However, like all good things – It is not perfect – you cannot start using it as soon as you install it. you need to spend hours / days looking for software and drivers that will replace your trusted ‘butler-type’ operating system. You cannot install MsOffice, Photoshop or ANY games out there.

BUT it is one of the best brands out there because they bring a smile to the people using it. They provide a sense of community to everyone who take part. They let everyone know that they will keep innovating at all times to be able to launch twice a year. Versions come out in April and October every year.

They provide a tribe for its consumers to be a part of and be proud of.

I have been looking at the features in the new version. I admit that it will probably drop my productivity by 50% in the beginning, making me work to get audio coming out of my semi-functional Dell (more on that later) and depriving me of some games and software that i am used to.

BUT in doing so, in making me look at the community for answers to fix it / install it – they show how engaged the tribe is. how proud everyone is to be using Ubuntu and sticking it to the Man.

Every time I run Ubuntu, I start smiling. That I believe is a sign of a great Brand.