The Strategy Review

Understanding Engagement - Part Five: A Case in Point

Runners are Nike’s original audience … and they’re a peculiar, isolated breed: it’s a bit like fishing, an exclusive and mysterious passion.

Nike and Apple developed and announced their Nike + venture several years ago, bringing together two of the worlds brand icons in one tech-led brand experience initiative.

The Nike + product at its most basic tracks your runs, coaches you, and enables you to upload the details of every run. There are motivational tools too, as well as cute functions like a booster tune. Sadly perhaps, the most popular one is “Eye Of The Tiger”.

Tens of thousands of runners are using the service to form virtual clubs – and to tell the stories of not just their runs, but of building a more sweeping Identity story about the process of “becoming a bigger, better Me”;

The shared data of their runs is alchemised into personal and tribal capital, and this most isolated of hobbies becomes deeply social and powerfully rewarding.

With Nike +, a runner’s Identity is tribalised and legitimised: “I Am A Runner!”

A continuing socialised narrative of struggle, achievement and progress, gives regular, reinforcing Expression to that Identity;

These powerful, transformational experiences – both personal and tribal – grow Consumer Equity. We can see the fresh access and Brand Intimacy with key influencers and consumers that Nike has created – warmth, trust, and willingness to engage.

Understanding Engagement - Part Four: Advocacy and Amplification

We’re rightly fascinated by Advocacy. 

Not only because positive word of mouth has long been recognised for its power and relative impact.

But also because, in a media context where access and permissions become constantly tougher to achieve, and when online media and digital tools have created a whole new layer of consumer connectedness and influence over brand equity …

… the opportunity to go beyond mere “occasional serendipitous buzz”, to repeatably recognise, deliver, tribalise and measure networked consumer intimacy seems now within reach.

So what – really – drives the Advocacy that will drive our brands deeper Behind The Line?

The roots of truly credible, sustainable brand advocacy lie in smart, observant, consumer-led brand innovation. This “true advocacy” can’t be bought in the same way that we have historically bought media: the best brand advocacy is earned.

Despite a logical connection and superficial resemblance, advocacy is not the same as loyalty: the dynamic’s utterly different; furthermore, while any loyal customer is a powerful asset to a brand, our advocates need many specific extra attributes in order to be of positive value;

But first – and most -  of all, what’s in it for the consumer?

When consumers act as brand advocates, they’re rarely promoting the brand, but that aspect of themselves that the brand helps them feel good about: in other words, a facet of their own identity, not the brand’s – identifying with the brand, and then speaking about themselves, using the brand as a conduit. 

When we’re dealing with this phenomenon, traditional planning and measurement are less central, and personal media and tribal models of engagement become important.

This consumer – strongly influenced by tribal opinions and trends – controls the game of attention and media value, saying “Never mind about your brand. Tell me about … myself!”

So … advertising used to be just about distribution of content and messaging … here it’s consumers themselves who are distributed: their “personal brand messages”, pushed out via ringtone, via carefully-monitored brand purchases, and of course via their media selections.

This we can call “The Distributed Me”.

We know all about brand equity.

This new “Consumer Equity” is the extra value a brand creates in the experience of today’s in-control consumer, no longer just promising, but repeatably delivering enhanced Consumer Identity and Consumer Expression;

This is the new currency of premium brand communications: it’s this with this that we “pay the consumer” for the Intimacy – the warmth, trust and receptiveness and accessibility – that we need. 

What do we buy when we buy a premium brand?

Most of all, we buy access to a story of which we can take some personal ownership.

It’s the new, bigger, richer story of Me, and I need help to live in it.

This means I seek to accessorise myself with the tools of Social Display, because it’s not enough to succeed …

… others must see it happening and share it with me;

Today, the trappings of the premium brand are almost all social: it’s a new language spoken by the connoisseurs, the (very small) club of aficionados, the inner circle, the “people who know”.

Many of the most important communication opportunities and brand experiences in premium are delivered via or in the context of the tribe;

In fact, these days it’s also the tribe that defines many of those attributes.

Premium brand communications need to support and enable me to enact two ideas about my Consumer Identity.

I am both unique, and I am part of an exclusive tribe. 

These are interlocking, mutually reinforcing elements to be managed in parallel by the brand.

While personal concierge-type services and experiences are often used to build the sense of my special uniqueness, the complementary tribal affiliations are built with, for example, exclusive contract publishing magazines and restricted brand-sponsored events.

Tribal belonging is also powerfully built – not always by brands but certainly by luxury elites (art, wines, yachting, haute couture and so on) using private Knowledge and Codes.

These enable the all-important Social Display which commonly forms the Expression opportunity for the premium consumer.

How on earth can we engage with and manage this troublesome new dynamic? Don’t worry, we can do it.

The Whole Equation ... Revisited

Like many media folks – or the lucky ones – I just made it back to London from MIPTV in Cannes, in the wake of the Icelandic volcano crisis. Hopefully by the time you read this, it’ll be resolved and everyone will have made it home!

For the first time at MIP I think, the agenda, the featured speakers and the mood of the delegates came together to really embrace and engage with “what comes next”.

Talk of digital was everywhere, and the digitally-led “Content 360” element of the conference was both heavily attended and much-discussed. Interesting also to see not only Ogilvy – to my mind still one of the great agencies – supporting MIP for the fourth year running, but also clients from Coke and Nestle both in attendance, and actively participating in keynotes, workshops and branded content sessions. Finally an important corner is being turned, and we saw this at MIP 2010.

Entertainment, of course, has always looked dangerously simple from the outside. Listen to Scott Fitzgerald – one of Hollywood’s tragic casualties – writing in The Last Tycoon:

“You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood, too but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

But today there’s another Whole Equation (or perhaps a significantly extended version of the established one) that we in entertainment must engage with, analyse and solve, if we are to unlock the new value, models and revenue streams that are demanded by the profound cultural flux that processing power and connectedness bestowed on our generation.

It’s an equation with the new consumer – totally connected, empowered and full of high expectation – at its heart. And, just like the traditional Hollywood model, it looks at first sight deceptively simple.

I advise divisions of substantial media players such as Fremantle, SyCo, Sky and Sony ATV, and “across the bridge”, brand advertiser clients such as Diageo (currently the world’s largest spirits company), Telefonica (the giant Spanish telco group) and Bacardi Global Brands. Most of my work is with senior executives who are asking themselves of this new consumer, just as Butch and Sundance did as they were pursued across America by their righteous and relentless persecutors … “Who ARE those guys?”

If you believe, like most do, that there’s a troubling shift on the content side in terms of new models, walk a mile in the shoes of a global CMO. The tried and true models of advertising investment and return are just not hitting the button the way they used to.

It’s my job to help “These Guys” understand “Those Guys” … To get to grips with the new consumer, and find convincing, sustainable, repeatable ways of moving marketing investment into not just reaching eyeballs with brand messaging, but getting over the wall, to seize and retain the quality attention of this prickly beast and its equally challenging – and apparently limitless – tribes of globally-connected fellows.

What concerns me about any post-digital media and entertainment innovation initiative that – without hesitation – puts Content at the heart of the equation is that … well, it’s not as simple as that anymore. We’re finding on the brand side that consumer-centric thinking – and this starts with a lot of smart online listening and analysis – is beginning to yield the effective, impactful and measurable impacts in the badlands of social media, content strategies and mobile, that the faltering steps of traditional advertising now demands.

This is not to say that great entertainment providers should be quaking in their boots in the face of Facebook and Twitter. There are those who argue that, but not me. Superb movies, TV and music speak – and earn – for themselves. But my point is both more blunt and more subtle.

Brands are still spending all in about $650bn per year on reaching “Those Guys”. Many of the giant advertisers are currently – rightly I believe – obsessed with moving significant spend into what’s called engagement marketing. Much of the flurry around the subject of so-called Branded Content derives from this trend. An awful lot of brand spend is heading this way.

The big movie and TV studios do one thing marvellously well. You call it entertaining audiences. Brands call it consumer engagement.

If we’re going to make the 360 thing – which means different things  to different people – really work, we need to bring these two highly diverse groups together in the same meaningful discussion. The brand on one side and the content on the other, naturally have enormous roles to play. But at the centre of the circle – the equation if you like – sits neither of these. 180 + 180 does not in this case equal 360.

It’s the new consumer. Hi there!

Understanding Engagement - Part Three: Getting Past Digital

Technology alone doesn’t tell us where to anchor the value of digital to a brand. 

Digital tools and systems are by now ubiquitous on both the demand and supply sides of the market.

It’s to affluent consumers themselves that we must look. Their expectations of complete control, “my time, my place, my terms” access, and their consistent avoidance of interruptive messaging, define the rules of attention.

Digital tools – the web, the mobile, IM and so on – are most usefully distinguished in this complicated landscape by their unprecedented closeness to the consumer. 

If mass media provide a sort of background chorus, the new digital services, in sharp contrast, are leading players … they have the ear and eye of the consumer at close quarters. In other words, this is a new challenge of Intimacy between consumer and brand.

And Intimacy, as we all know, is not that easy.

Digital tools are as much guardians of consumers’ pet likes and hates as they are – more traditionally – vehicles of consumption.  They express and enact the needs and values of the consumer. 

Getting close to our consumer – getting inside the gate in order to communicate with any credible effectiveness against the background of media noise – now requires the delivery of “up-front value”, rather than a bland, one-size-fits-all brand promise. 

It requires the sort of recognition and intelligent sensitivity that you’d expect from the concierge in your favourite boutique hotel. 

This is all about what we can call The New Intimacy. And let’s be clear: owning information about an individual is nowhere near the same as having a meaningful relationship with them. 

The intimate consumer relationship is built not in the database, but at the interface. Intimacy happens at close quarters, in real time. 

And this, if you buy the argument so far, is both the real promise and the massive challenge of consumer connections planning.

The networked, digitally empowered consumer has created an “infinitely small, infinitely large”, intimate media space, owned no longer by the media industry, but by this increasingly private - yet increasingly tribal – individual

We can call this the I-zone, as in I for Intimacy

Crossing the chasm both into and across the heart of the I-zone, is perhaps the most urgent challenge in consumer marketing today.

Tribes as well as individuals have their I-Zones … both are ring-fenced by digitally managed preferences, and tend to vigorously resist invasion by uninvited guests.

Why? Because the I-Zone reflects and supports the identity of individual or tribe … just as we feel slightly mugged when we’re sent mobile spam: individual or tribal … it’s all Personal.

It’s no longer just “media”.

Where does this leave media then? 

Stepping back, the most significant single impact of the digital revolution is a complete flip in value.

The Morecambe and Wise Xmas show – perhaps Carson in the US – in their heydays commanded the sort of audience numbers (and, importantly, their undivided attention …) that we dream of today.

Attention was everywhere – and media was very very scarce …

… meaning that consumers would happily pay for their entertainment by allocating their (cheap and plentiful) attention to brand communications;

Now media is everywhere, and the attention of the valuable consumer is the rare, precious commodity we must court;

This leads to a new model of media value and a new currency: Return On Attention.

So … what are the new rules of “ROA”?

Today’s consumer is spoiled for choice in terms of free, powerful, accessible and easy-to-use digital tools for play, creativity and communication: we can call these “Box X”: they’re what’s expected, almost a birthright for the younger consumer.

Attempts by brands to apply Box X-type offerings as engagement tactics (Coke’s early music downloads promotions service is perhaps a case in point) tend to be met with a consumer shrug.

However, when we a) understand what’s already happening in the Box X of our consumers’ digital life and then b) find ways to enhance those activities with experiences that are otherwise difficult for consumers to do themselves …

… we’re creating what we can call “Box Y”. 

This is where the value-added Return On Attention begins, and where powerful, sustainable consumer>brand Intimacy originate.

Understanding Engagement - Part Two: Looking "Behind The Line"

Advertising used to be all about media. Media is all about buying and selling consumer attention. Consumer attention used to be a more or less passive player in the game of media.

Think of a bowling alley, with the alley as a channel, the ball as a brand; the skittles at the end of the alley, waiting to be knocked over and racked up again, are … consumers!

The bowler – just like an agency managing a campaign – hurls the big heavy ball again and again down the alley, scoring points by knocking over as many skittles as possible. 

This is how the traditional eyeball/impression-based media planning and buying business of reach and frequency works. And when we’re looking for large-scale brand awareness, there’s still no better way to achieve our goals.

And let’s not imagine that it doesn’t take considerable skill and size to knock over lots of skittles, and do so repeatably. It certainly does.

The problems for bowling alley-style advertising begin, however, when the hitherto passive skittles wake up, start chatting to each other, and moving about.

With the Internet, an entirely new and disruptive type of dynamic appeared in media. If Media 1.0 is best summarised with our bowling alley analogy, then Media 2.0 resembles nothing so much as a pinball machine.

We fire the ball (which again stands in for the brand) – with perhaps an illusion of control – up onto the board. 

Note that the board is sealed in glass: we can see exactly what’s happening, but can do more or less nothing about it (we’ll come back to flippers and nudging …) after launching the brand/ball into play.

And what does happen to the ball? 

It’s the bumpers at the top of the board that produce the high scores. With all the flashing lights, pumping and thumping noises and bells, our brand/ball is bashed back and forth around and between the bumpers. 

And note: each of these bumpers has what our skittle consumer entirely lacked – an energy of their own. 

They push back.

This is what today’s active, tribal consumers do with information, with brand communications, with media of any kind. 

With the new control and energy provided by the web - also by increasingly rich-featured mobile – they, not we, determine the flow of the game and the score.

We do in pinball have access to those feeble digits, the board’s flippers: in the course of a campaign, we have the occasional opportunity to step into the game. 

To do what? One thing only: to use the “flippers” to drive the ball back to that high-scoring cluster of rambunctious bumpers: to keep the brand in the new game of tribal media.

When all else fails, perhaps we can try a frustrated “nudge” of the pin table. But when we push our 21st century consumer too hard, most of the time the machine just tilts, and it’s game over.

This is dramatically different from what went before.

Understanding Engagement - Part One: "Who Are Those Guys?"

This series of posts is an introduction to how brands can convert digital strategies and tactics into manageable, measurable and sustainable consumer Intimacy, Advocacy and Amplification.

The overall dynamic – when we get it right – is about taking content and brand “Behind The Line” into tribal and viral media, and ensuring that a meaningful, sustainable dialogue with - and between - consumers and their tribes is ignited and managed forwards.

Let’s put this in some context.

Today, our sense of who we are, and our ways of making sense of the world, increasingly gravitate to People Like Us.

Trust in church, state and commerce have dropped dramatically in 15 years, in parallel with a huge surge in consumer to consumer (C2C) communications;

Especially among premium brands, permissions for brands are mediated and controlled by consumer tribes, while premium value is both conferred and driven up by acceptance and C2C messaging between tribal consumers.

Today, with so many compelling and free experiences being instantly available to the aspirational, connected consumer, smart brands seek to understand the experiences and lifestyle meaning these consumers find in their tribes …

… recognising that new type of value, and finding ways of significantly enhancing it with brand-relevant services, and being powerfully rewarded with networked approval and positive buzz.

Where previously the isolated consumer was the “final destination” or end-point of brand communications, now, remarkably, the tribal networked consumer is becoming a departure point for “direct to tribe to consumer” communications.

Brand messaging is carried to hitherto hard-to-reach locations, both into and across tribes of consumers: access, permissions and precious intimacy can turn into highly valuable advocacy and amplification.

The brand plays a critical but still partially understood role here, as a facilitator of the dramatically different new consumer experiences that the digital revolution has enabled.

When we make these socially aspirational consumers happy, we both equip and motivate them to share their stories – with our brands riding along in the slipstream – into, across and beyond the networked tribes.

Freely available media tools such as YouTube, and the very social networks within which these identities and narratives are enacted day-to-day, provide the means of very effective and economical production and distribution for all this positive brand energy.

So … it’s in recognising, supporting and enhancing this entirely modern new cultural process that the most powerful opportunities for brand value, access to the tribal consumer, and permissions to meaningfully and intimately engage, lie.

The Game of Plotwit

A number of people - not many - a select few - have been seeing cryptic references to The Game of Plotwit on Twitter and Facebook. I launched it a couple of weeks ago with friend and colleague Tom Gueterbock of the excellent gaming company 3rd Sense.

Plotwit's a parlour game designed for micro-media, based on the idea that - for some of us anyway - Smart, Quick and Funny is the new Sexy. We pick a title once a day - a movie or book - and players Tweet by replying to the original Tweet a three word "Plotwit" of the title. The smartest, quickest and funniest entries win the day.

So for example, "The Lord of the Rings" (the movie) could yield a player entry of "Tiny Little Legs", or 'Visit New Zealand". These appear in the world of Twitter as (challenge) #thelordoftherings and (entry) #tinylittlelegs, enabling players to track the game and their own entries - and vote for others (which is done by Retweeting) using the hashtags that drive Twitter.

The original Plotwit - and still to my mind the best - arose when I was talking one day with my friend Steve Brown, the great music consultant. I floated the idea of Plotwit - not at the time as a social game but as something that could be fun ... I said, "Take, for example, I dunno ... Kafka's Metamorphosis?" Without, as I remember, drawing serious breath, he came back: "Bug Goes Mad".

After rolling helplessly round on the floor for a while (well I did), we realised that there was something a bit special there. And that - about a year ago - is where The Game of Plotwit came from.

So, pop over to the page and follow it, if you're a smart / quick / funny person. Or like a bit of a laugh in the working day. Or, and we know you're out there, you're wondering what Twitter's actually for!

Malcolm MacLaren dead in NYC

R.I.P.O.F.F!

Perhaps this is one of MM's finer moments ... 

Prof Robin Dunbar gets deep around the "new friendship"

Key lecture at RSA on real social networking impacts by Connected author