Archive for the ‘Branding’ Category

The Old Spice Man backlash has started. Is it justified?

Jul 21st, 2010
Posted by kent in Branding, Interactive Strategy, Social Media

So the Old Spice Man backlash has begun.

Time (speaking of brands that could use an update), is calling the campaign a #fail because sales have reportedly dropped by 7% (comparing June 09/10 to the previous year. The blogosphere’s piling on, too, with BNet and Jezebel taking a few kicks at the Man Your Man Could Smell Like (and I don’t know about you, but I get ALL of my marketing advice from Jezebel).

So how could this be? The Man has had over 12 million YouTube views and counting, they’ve had thousands of people participate in their interactive video push, they’ve had more positive earned media mentions than anyone other than their PR agency can count. By every “soft” category of measurement — exposure, engagement, influence — Old Spice Man has been a HUGE success.

So why isn’t that translating into hard ROI?

Jezebel has a theory — it’s about gender (surprise) — and the industry  is starting to play this as a repeat of the old “great creative doesn’t get results” story.

I’ve got another theory: the numbers are bullshit (for now).

Leaving aside the fact that the sales data exclude WalMart, let’s look at the time period. Years ending June 2009 vs June 2010.

Old Spice Man launched in February of 2010, so on the surface it makes sense that you should see some lift in the units sold data for year ending June 2010.

But The Man didn’t really start to go viral until May/June of this year (at least that’s when I first saw him, and I don’t think I’m THAT far out of the loop)[correction: i just looked it up -- I first saw The Man in February, although it feels a lot more recent than that]. And Proctor and Gamble (Old Spice’s parent company) didn’t make their REAL viral push — with their “get a custom message from the Old Spice Man” thing — until mid-July.

Last week I tweeted a link to 7 Social Media Lessons you can Learn form the Old Spice Man. Here’s the 8th lesson: social media marketing takes time.

It takes time to build relationships. It takes time for the people that know, like and trust you to develop the intention to become your customers. Heck, it takes time to run out of body wash and to need to go buy more.

Social media marketing isn’t a campaign. It isn’t something that you can flip a switch on and see lift from  next week. It’s a process. A process that’s built on long-term awareness and engagement.

Old Spice Man is building that engagement, so I’m not ready to write him off yet.



Ten ways to turbocharge your business with Facebook

May 27th, 2010
Posted by kent in Branding, Social Media

IT Business has put together a little slideshow primer on how to better use Facebook to grow your business.

Most of these tips are more appropriate for business-to-consumer marketing than for B2B, but there are a couple of gems that could benefit any business, like connecting Twitter and your Facebook status to make the most of both.

Ten ways to turbocharge your brand and business with Facebook – IT Business Slideshow Index.



Is the Click Still King?

May 10th, 2010
Posted by kent in Branding, Metrics and Measurement, Online Advertising, eCommerce

eMarketer asks. “is the click still King?” noting:

Despite widespread recognition that the click-through does not measure the full effect of an online ad [...] and calls for better branding metrics, many marketers still rely on the easy-to-track click as their top performance metric.

What’s really interesting is that when you ask marketers what they think they should be measuring, they say “ROI” — they’re just not actually measuring it.

I think the issue is that a lot of businesses don’t know how to measure or track online ROI — so they default to measuring the top-line thing their analytics reports give them: clicks and visits.

I know that’s definitely true for our clients (before they start working with us, that is) and one of the biggest aha moments we have with most clients is when we help them determine a set of Key Performance Indicators for measuring Return on Investment and put in place analytics software to track them.

via Is the Click Still King? – eMarketer.



Bell’s TV re-brand disconnects

Jan 7th, 2010
Posted by kent in Branding, User Experience

It’s been a little over  a year since Bell Canada re-branded their satellite TV service, changing the name form Bell ExpressVu to simply Bell TV, as part of an over-all corporate re-branding. At the time Bell’s President and CEO, George Cope, said of the new brand, “it’s a straightforward and customer-focused brand that directly supports the Bell team’s goal: To be recognized by customers as Canada’s leading communications company.” It’s also a classic example of a company completely misunderstanding branding to its great expense.

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