In taste, brand matters

My latest post is out on MarketingDaily. In it, I talk about the power of packaging to influence taste. Research has show that people are highly sensitive to non-taste cues when they are evaluating the taste of something.

As I say in the post: "It’s not just about the product inside. The brand matters because it tells consumers what to expect and influences how they evaluate a product." 

You may be curious which beer was the "outright loser" in my blind taste test (maybe as curious as I am about why this part of the story was edited out) but, hopefully, your curiosity is now satisfied.

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15 Social Media Tips for the holidays

Here's my holiday gift to my readers. To be honest, it's a regift, since these social media tips were originally published (in longer form) in the MarketingDaily. There are five tips on basic social media principles and approach and ten tips on criteria for planning social media programs.

Principles
1. Be human
Social media is about engaging with customers on a personal level, something marketers sometimes forget. In social media interaction, you should be asking yourself: 'What would a human do?' And do that.
2. Don’t overreach
Most brands, especially CPG brands, aren't all that engaging from a consumer perspective. So go easy on the pedal--the #1 reason that brands get 'unliked' on Facebook is that they post too frequently.
3. Add value
You can always add value, however mundane your product. You can provide useful information, take up an important cause or, if all else fails, give out coupons (which is what most consumers want anyway).
4. Listen and respond
95% of questions posted on their Facebook are not answered. 95%! I don't think answering questions is optional. You get to talk but you also need to listen and respond.
5. Use the f*ing tools yourself
Only 26% of CMOs are actually using social media tools. Not good enough!

Criteria
1. Brand-led
Start with the brand, not the social media platform.
2. Theme-led
Build your social media activities around a specific theme. This helps pull everything together and makes the program more impactful. 
3. Product fit
Develop programs that take advantage of things your company is good at or known for. These will have more credibility, authenticity and impact.
4. Customer interests
Develop ideas that appeal to your customers. Find out what they like and what they care about enough to spend some of their limited free time discussing with you.
5. Other marketing program fit
Leverage your existing marketing activity. Programs that build on advertising or promotion activity or sponsorship events have a head start. 
6. Social media fit
Pick the right social media platform for your activity--each one is great for some things, less suited for others. Not everything needs to on Facebook!
7. Impact
Select programs that are worth the effort in terms of the number and quality of people they will reach.
8. Efficiency
Define the objectives of your social media activities upfront and identify the metrics that you will use to see if they worked.
9. Risk assessment
Assess the risk are you incurring with social media activities.
10.  Long term vs. short term
Make sure, especially for longer-term programs, that you are going to be able to support them both financially and operationally.

Meanwhile, The CMO Council has published a survey which shows that marketers are continuing to struggle with what to do with social media. The survey polled both consumers and marketers and found a significant gap between what people want from brands and what they are actually getting.

As the report says: "The bottom line is that consumers want more—more experiences, more engagement, more rewards, and more reasons to connect with each other and brands through social media. And brands are missing the boat. They see the benefits of reaching out to customers through social channels, but they aren’t yet fully invested. While 52 percent of marketers reported they believe their brands have enjoyed greater influence thanks to their presence in social networks like Facebook, only 17 percent said that social media is fully meshed, aligned, and integrated into the overall marketing mix."

Lots more to do in 2012!

Lululemon puts an Ayn Rand stamp on yoga

Lululemon has ridden the wave of yoga's popularity with great success, selling high end yoga clothes and promoting healthy living. So deciding to associate with a philosophy that's the antithesis of what yoga is all about seems a little odd, to say the least. 

As reported on NPR, the company's new shopping bags feature the question: "Who is John Galt?". And who is John Galt? He's the protagonist of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged where she laid out her Objectivist philosophy, including the idea that selfishness is a virtue, a very un-yoga-like position.

Why this seeming act of self-destruction? Lululemon's own post on the subject explains that Chip Wilson, the company's founder, read Atlas Shrugged when he was 18 and was really inspired by it. So this could be a simple story about another ego-charged CEO running amok. But it's a bit more complicated than that.

The company was, in fact, founded with the mission to "elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness," an idea straight out of the Rand book. And its culture reflects many of her ideals. If you look at Lululemon's brand manifesto, you can see that it's a sampling of ideas and philosophies, some yoga-compatible ("The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness") and some more Rand-like ("Successful people replace the words 'wish,' 'should' and 'try' with 'I WILL.'"). 

As long as you don't delve too deeply, the company's mix and match of ideas kind of holds together and the company has clearly thrived despite its ideological impurity. The problem with the John Galt bags is that they shine a bright light at just one of the sources of inspiration and a very polarizing one at that. Now everyone who buys from the store will be carrying out a political statement as well as some expensive clothes.

Let's see what the impact will actually be. Maybe nothing. Whole Foods didn't suffer any lasting damage when its CEO did something similar. But the bags have caused quite a stir in some quarters of the yoga community with many promising never to buy anything from the store ever again.

Australia's new cigarette law bans branded packaging, tests branding principles

Australia has become the first country in the world to ban the branding of cigarette packages. From next July, all packs will look like the one in the picture--they will be a deliberately unappealing olive green color, the brand of the manufacturer will be printed in a tiny, generic font (i.e. no trademarks) and the only images will be graphic health warnings. Thus the Australians are setting up an interesting, real world packaging test. What will happen when the new, generic packaging hits the shelves?

The one thing that the government and the cigarette manufacturers agree on is that the impact will be significant. Given previous bans on advertising, sponsorships and other forms of marketing communication, the pack is the last bastion of branding activity. Health Minister Nicola Roxon says that she believes the new law will give Australia the best chance of having the lowest smoking rate in the world.

Manufacturers, for their part, have threatened legal action on the basis that the new rules restrict their trademark and intellectual property rights. The British American Tobacco Australia (BATA) issued a statement which said: "The result of BATA's legal challenges could force Health Minister Nicola Roxon to pay tobacco companies billions of dollars for the removal of trademarks, brands and pack space."

Assuming these legal challenges fail and the law goes into effect, what will happen? Will demand go down as expected? Not according to the cigarette manufacturers. They are actually predicting that demand will go up because they will be forced to compete on price. David Crow, CEO of BATA, says that's what his company intends to do: "We will obviously focus on pricing given it's the only thing really left to differentiate brands."

So could the unintended consequence of the legislation be that smoking actually increases because the market is flooded with cheap cigarettes? The cigarette manufacturers have an obvious interest in coming up with worst-case scenarios but this one does seem to have some merit.

Moleskine misstep miffs most-loyals

Committing social media suicide by upsetting your most loyal fans is something of a trend. Netflix blazed a trail. And now it's Moleskine, maker of the "legendary" notebooks so beloved by the designers, following along.

With apparently no sense of a design community hot button issue, Moleskine thought it might be kind of cool to organize a competition to design a new logo. In other words, to crowdsource it. That's, to say the least, not going down too well with one-time Moleskine lovers, now turning into Moleskine haters. Here's a comment posted on Moleskine's Facebook page by Seth Johnson which is representative of the aggrieved point of view:

"Count me as another designer who has purchased and loved your products for years but feels slapped in the face by your shortsighted attempt to crowdsource a logo. No more will I be purchasing or using your products; no longer will I advocate for your brand."

Maria Raudva, in another post, points out that the inserts in each notebook say: "Moleskine notebooks are partners for the creative and imaginative professions of our time." She thinks the competition is more about plundering than partnering.

One way to measure your level of engagement with your customers is to see how much of their free time they spend with you on social media. Brands with strong customer relationships benefit from a steady stream of user-generated content that might be comments or videos or statements of their love and affection. That's probably what Moleskine hoped to tap into with its competition. But there's a big difference between giving up some of your free time and giving up some of your professional time for free.

Crowdsourcing has worked for some brands. It's worked well for Doritos who've used competitions to generate Super Bowl ads. I'm sure the professional community doesn't really like that competition either but they represent a miniscule part of the Doritos customer base. Not so with Moleskine, as it's finding out to its cost.

(If you are interested in a comprehensive perspective on rights of authorship in new media and how free contributions are leading to our collective impoverished future, read this interview with Jaron Lanier, published at Edge.)

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Six CPG social media strategies (that work)

Shameless self-promotion alert!  I'm going to be the presenter on the next Landor Brandfeed, talking about different ways CPG marketers can be successful in social media. Sign-up here to listen live (October 27th at 1pm Pacific) or go to landor.com/brandfeed sometime the following week to listen to a recording.

The presentation will be based on this article published earlier this year.

Is Unilever in favor of the fight against the corrosive power of banks and multinational corporations?

When it comes to aligning yourself with causes, how far is too far? And how far can individual brands of a product portfolio stray from the corporate family consensus?

Ben & Jerry's is testing the boundaries of both these questions with its support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a movement with the published aim of "fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process."

Such a move is on-brand for Ben & Jerry's to the extent that the company has always had a strong social component to its mission statement and already supports free trade, livable wages and community actions for social, environmental and economic justice. But, even for Ben & Jerry's, is associating and supporting a movement that is both anti-corporate and unpredictable in its future direction a step too far? Is this the sort of thing that an ice cream company should be doing?

And what about Unilever, the very type of large multinational corporation that the movement is protesting about? Can it really disassociate itself completely from what its 100%-owned company decides to do?

Ben & Jerry's has always been given a lot of leeway to do what it wants and it does have an independent board of directors. But is there no limit?