Philip

Is branding really a drug?

It is interesting to see Wetherspoons Tim Martin talking about the demise of Jamie’s Italian as the seduction of branding. As chairman of the UK’s number one pub brand, as awarded by the World Branding Awards last year, one would of thought he was a keen advocate, albeit Wetherspoons do seem to take great delight in stating they are not a brand and each individual outlet is an entity in its own right, I feel the YouGov data relating to ‘Spoons kind of undercuts all that, as the great British public do indeed see ‘Spoons as collective brand. One nurtured over time and preserved via strict policing of values and delivery details.

Branding is a drug, not

 

Tim Martin would have people believe branding is some kind of spell that you cast over customers which wears off after a while – but in the real world, it’s far more complicated. The hospitality industry is super difficult and any venue, regardless of how good or how expensive its food is, will likely fail inside two years without major investment in branding and marketing. This is true whether it’s backed by a newly crowned TV chef or a hipster pop-up going permanent. Jamie Oliver’s casual dining brands were as much an experience for customers as they were for staff, mostly to the good and but were born from and reflective of an earlier, predelivery time.

 

But trends move on and brands have to keep up with their audiences’ changing expectations. It’s a very competitive place, and consumers buy into experience. Nando’s and Wagamama have invested in their brand and the customer experience once in branch, providing digital experiences that can speed up the ordering, remove the risk of customer service slip ups, and allow customers to pay without all that awkward signing for the bill.

 

This last point is really important and where detractors like Tim Martin miss the very thing they are actually doing, Wetherspoons focuses on the customer experience that is branding. Its way too simplistic to think branding stops at a logo and a colourful menu. Hospitality brands are built from the customer experience outwards. 

 

Meanwhile, it’s also important to remember that ownership models have also changed, and this will have had an impact on the fate of Jamie’s Italian. His investors brought in venture capitalists to expand, and the model became detached from its origins. Running for new profit targets ended up undermining the very essence of a brand identity that both customers and staff had bought into.

 

So, it’s bonkers to suggest it’s not about brand. In fact, no matter what Tim Martin now claims, Wetherspoon’s itself is a brand built extremely carefully in a singular vision. And while it may be easy to poke fun at Jamie Oliver, it’s important to remember that he is someone who guided his organisation and invested heavily in training and motivating lots of youngsters who would have been unlikely to enter the industry through normal channels. Along the way, he got vast swaths of the general population to cook their own food. None of these things are bad.

 

It isn’t only about product or only about brand – it always has to be both. The brands that continue to thrive in this challenging market are the ones delivering both, great food and great experiences. The issue for so many stars of the zeitgeist, not just Jamie’s, is that tastes and fashion clear move at a pace. Your business, the brand, needs to be engineered to adapt and move on. Without the investment to do this the outlets were destined to fail in time, which they duly did. 

Time for a ‘Plain Lion’?

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Have we lost the art of plain speaking? Samsung’s Chief Marketing Officer, YoungHee Lee told the audience at Cannes that to connect with GenZ it was important to harness the power of ‘Storyliving’ over storytelling. Twitter pretty universally responded WTF? I know this was at an advertising festival that has history in the championing of made up words. But as many have pointed out since, in the real world it's laughable. It’s the type of lexicon bingo that has so devalued our industry.

Our job fundamentally is to inform people of the advantage of our client’s brand. We do this in as clearly and emotively engaging manner as possible. The simplicity and clarity of a few words to describe the complex.

It’s not just the stereotyping of generations that so offends in this Tweet, it’s the meaningless re-labelling of observed behaviour. There are good points made in YoungHee Lee’s talk. Brands do need to live the version of life they portrayed in their advertising. People are seeking proof of a brands stated intentions. But for so many, all these good points will be lost by the scrambling of verbs.

Cannes is an international event aiming to foster better work across the world. Its stated mission of fostering understanding and better communications. So, I have an idea. A new award. The Plain Lion. Awarded to the speaker with courage and commitment to deliver their thoughts in the most succinct, clear and easily understood manner. In this age of misunderstandings and alternative facts. Surely now more than ever, we need a Plain-Speaking Lion to celebrate those who can communicate with a universal language of clarity.

Amazon does an Ad

Amazon is a brand advertiser as well as an advertising platform. Both fuelled by a data factory that is mainly funded by its client brands and end customers. A pretty neat trick you have to admit.

Amazon is data. Amazon advertising is a reflection of data science meets human creativity. The emotive Christmas ad, created by agency ‘Lucky generals’ is cute, maybe not be quite as fun as last year’s version of the same idea. But it works on pulling the heart strings. The rational product ads and offers, created in-house, also work. but not as art, but as Frighteningly efficient, laser targeted messengering.

It has been well documented that advertising is going through fundamental changes and brand owners need to clearly take stock of how they spend marketing budgets. Amazon have just done things on a much bigger scale and much faster than most brands are able.

Amazon are by a number of markers the epitome of the new age of advertising. A heady mix of magic and logic. The magic comes in the form of their brand advertising agency Lucky Generals who have made this year’s Christmas TV spot, featuring singing boxes to the tune of the Jacksons ‘Can you feel it’ The logic? Oh, there is a whole ton of that. First, they have invested heavily in an in-house creative facility called D1 that produces all of their product and tactical advertising. Secondly and way more intriguing is what Amazon are doing with their customer behaviour insights. Amazon is after all a unique beast, a retailer who is also the country’s third largest advertising platform who is also a major advertiser in its own right. Data science is completely at the heart of this. Proven in the first week of December when the brand briefly over took Microsoft and Apple to becomes the world’s most valuable.

Amazon do still need to persuade us about its expanding service. For that they need ads. Their voice assistant Alexa is a very good example. For the last year it’s been the gift of choice, selling upwards of 50+ million devices worldwide. But and it’s a massive but so far, their advertising, especially that of its retail partners from grocery to fashion have failed to convince us to shop using the thing. Earlier this year a leaked report put the numbers of consumers buying via voice assistants at a little over 5%. To improve on this figure Amazon, need to change ingrained behaviours. Especially in the UK where our inherent reserved nature means that rambling down a shopping list, without saying ‘sorry’ about a gazillion is going to be really hard. It’s no wonder that the most any UK based Alexa gets to do is tell the time and pick from Spotify. To change such behaviours takes very bold creative ideas aligned to an equally bold media budget. So far Amazon have held back from such a move hoping its clients will use their own budgets to do that, as Ocado is currently doing

It is very insightful that while Amazon has potentially the most valuable data set of customer intentions of any retailer. They have invested heavily in the magic of longer-term brand building to complement shorter term rational messaging. Not so long-ago Amazon’s advertising was looked after by an American advertising legend Droga5, a well-established, hugely creative agency, who undoubtedly would have continued to produce eye catching ads. But Amazon took a bold step and appointed a relatively new UK agency Lucky Generals known for creative that really gets the emotive nature of culture. The recent IPA effectiveness study into advertising highlighted the importance for brand health of longer term emotive brand building messaging. This to play alongside shorter term tactical messenges of price and features. The temptation for so many brands is to only do the latter, hoping for an upswing before thinking about commissioning the former. Empirical evidence in the IPA report from 900+ case studies in over 70 categories across almost 20 years proves this to be a real folly.

But Amazon are not finished yet. Lessons from Alibaba’s real world experiments in Asia with retailer brands like Huma show that we are only just touching the edge of what seamless customer experiences could be. Amazon has many experiments currently running in real world retail and financial products to test these waters. You get the sense of a brand very much developing its next stage after successfully reformulating for mobile

 There has been recent coverage of the potential of Amazon launching a free to air video streaming service. This could be massive for brands. While Amazon Prime remains ad free. An open access channel could be a gold mine of consumer intentions. Not only would you know who they are, past purchases etc. But once they have been exposed to an add you would be able to correlate future behaviours of brands brought, categories browsed etc. There isn’t another advertising platform that could offer that. But would many people be watching? Well it goes without saying Amazon has access to epic content, it just remains to be seen how far they will go in getting one.

Is AI draining the emotion out of advertising?

AI is fundamentally changing business and those it employs, no more so than in marketing communications. Jaywing is deeply involved. We are not only a developer of AI driven marketing technology but a large employer of the very jobs that this technology is replacing.

 We therefore feel expertly qualified to host a debate about AI.

Has the potential of AI driven guaranteed results opened up the possibility of doing away with the mystic behind creativity? Undoubtedly automation can help brands gain a much quicker, more accurate short term attention. But what are the long-term effects? Does automation in marketing offer a backdoor to more sinister uses of AI? Less scary, but no less important is that research indicates that a more emotional, tangentially random human approach has more profitable outcomes.

 Jaywing’s Head of AI Martin Benson and Director of Strategy Philip Slade go head to head to debate the question of how to achieve better creative marketing for brands. The dependable logic of AI or the capricious nature of creative humans.

 "More human than human" – Tyrell / Blade Runner

 "People asked a computer, 'Is there a God?' And the computer said, 'There is now,' and fused the plug."  Stephen Hawking

Brand activation at boutique festivals

I was recently asked for my thoughts about taking advantage of a last minute commercial space booking at Wilderness 2016

The audience of high net worth individuals. Very much the epitome of the ‘HENRY’ (High Earner Not Rich Yet) What makes this audience at this type of event so interesting is they are in an experimental, release mind-set, looking to try new things and collect as many experiences as possible. Brands that provide the stage for unforgettable memories especially those that people want to share using photos and video will win.

There are a number of things brands can do to help increase their awareness at such events. Key thing is this is not big logos, brand speak and blanket branding. There are other types of festivals for that approach.

Checklist onsite activity (separate note TBC for VIP areas, carpark and transport node activities)

SPARK INTEREST. The audience have come to try new food and see interesting ‘stuff’ most will be onsite for all 3 days. This is about both a planned sequence of events and fuelling the joy of discovery with unexpected ‘happenings’ 

BE USEFUL. Timetables, maps, insider tips of best routes to hidden stages/cafes/better loos, -Wifi and charging points are now pretty much expected. But make sure the wifi can not only collect data but also provide information. I.e. the password = ‘9pm special guest’ or ‘2 4 1 at 3pm’ VIP WC, Cover if it rains, lend out brolleys, blankets, cushions, shade if its sunny, A place to sit, a place to eat food brought at another stall etc. an area to do something fun. – Secret areas, areas that change day to night.

OWN MEMORIES. Provide a distinctive environment that encourages sharing of images.  Physically through creative dressing, lighting effects or theming – all of which specifically designed to look good on Instagram formats. Especially at night! But also digitally by geo-tagging/fencing your physical area. Everyone checking in on social media will then receive a prompt of ‘The Sipsmith special (name) place’ - if the name sounds cool and builds kudos for the audience they will use it. – again especially if this is specific to time of day or event happening.

COLLABORATE. There are bound to be complimentary brands on site, increase your coverage by producing joint activity. Especially if this is a bit secret and part of the discovery. Only regular customers are told or mailed about it before hand – it will spread on social if it sounds intriguing i.e. Buying both brands unlocks the location or entry to a special activity. 

OFFER SOMETHING NEW. All of this audience have wide social circles, most of who are not here at this event. Provide a keepsake or experience that they can take back to their circle to share in conversation to gain social kudos. This could be something as simple as joining a special ‘Wilderness’ sect of the mailing list or worshipful membership or unique flavours served in the festival bar. All the way up to distilling a unique gin on site that can only be pre-ordered at the festival to be delivered later to the person’s home. –Remember the audience are in ‘high spending/treating’ mind-set.

Laurent-Perrier at Wilderness did most of the above, some more successful than others but they did keep physical branding to a minimum and as such did command social media coverage in both stories and images. Much of the traditional media coverage also highlighted their area as the place to be.