John Lewis, a bear, a hare and a lesson in advertising

Well that is Christmas done for another year and decorations are being taken down across the land. Although retailers are already at the tail end of the January sales the inquisition into Christmas performances has already started.

In some cases it is not good news. Debenhams has issued a profit warning stating same store sales for the 17 weeks to 28 December increased 0.1%, below expectations. Although you could blame part of this on a forgettable Christmas marketing campaign, the real blame lies with the increased pressure on early discounting.

Way before the usual Boxing Day sales started, many big name high street brands slashed prices and introduced flash sales in an attempt to gain footfall and sales. French Connection, New Look, M&S, House of Fraser and Boots all used discounting, offering up to 50 per cent cuts to entice shoppers. Unfortunately when one does, the rest are often forced to follow.

Both John Lewis and House of Fraser though have posted strong results. John Lewis enjoyed a 6.9% increase in sales with sales from its website accounting for almost a third of its total income over the festive period.

John Lewis credited the bear and hare television campaign as a key driver of this growth. The £7m campaign (£1m on the production of the ad alone) was launched like a movie premiere and garnered press coverage like it was. It was watched 11.5m times on YouTube alone. However as well as the ad itself you could also buy toys of the characters, a book telling the story (which became its best selling children’s title over Christmas), chocolate, slippers and of course the alarm clock itself. The soundtrack even went to number 1 in the charts.

Not everyone has £7m to spend on a campaign but it helped deliver sales of £734m over 5 weeks. John Lewis managed that rare trick of creating a multi-channel event from a simple creative idea. Rather than just creating a TV campaign they created a whole world for people to be part of, share and purchase. I suspect next year we will see similar from the other high street retailers still left.

Tim Youngman is director of marketing for Archant

Tesco, Amscreen and a Selfie at the pumps

In August I wrote a column about facial recognition in advertising. It was in response to the announcement from one of Sir Alan Sugar’s companies, Amscreen, that it was fitting facial recognition cameras to billboards to allow them to show more targeted advertising to individuals. The cameras could tell whether someone was male or female and approximate age and deliver ads appropriately.

Fast forward just three months and now Tesco has announced that it is planning to install Amscreen technology in all of its 450 petrol stations in a five year deal. The announcement means that very soon Tesco petrol purchasers, when standing at the till to pay, will have their face scanned. Adverts will then appear on a screen in front of your face targeted at whether you are male or female and approximate age, all while you are struggling to remember your pin and what pump you filled up at.

Although Amscreen and Tesco clearly stated that no images are stored and no data is collected, the announcement was met with the usual cries of despair from those concerned about data protection and privacy and intrusion. The reality is that the cameras are able to detect if they are seeing a face, its gender and approximate age and how much attention it pays to the screen. They claim a 90% accuracy rate at being able to detect male or female and unsurprisingly this accuracy rate goes down if the person is wearing a hat or covering their face in some way.

In August I finished my column by questioning whether the advancement of advertising technology and its ability to engage may actually turn people off through a sense of invasion. That question now seems much more real. With the screens expected to reach five million customers in the UK we may soon know the answer. Personally however I truly am looking forward to the first time I am standing waiting to pay and the camera gets the gender of the person in front of me wrong. I suspect my follicly challenged nature will mean this will not be an issue for me!

Tim Youngman is director of marketing for Archant  

Brand Experience - Focus on the real meaning

The term “brand experience” is often misused and miss quoted. Academically speaking it’s the experience your brand gives a consumer and so how they emotionally react or connect with it. This is based on whether it fulfils and is responsive to their needs, and very simply how it makes them feel.  Retailers spend millions trying to get that bit right when you walk into a store. Unfortunately it has now also become a catch all phrase that encompasses a whole new area of marketing.  

Many brands are now creating activities and events that allow consumers to experience a brand. This used to be the lady in the supermarket handing out the latest spread on a crumb of a cracker or the thimble of a new drink to try. Today this has evolved to a whole new level.

The best example of this comes from brand giants Procter & Gamble who in 2006 launched Charmin Restrooms at New York’s Times Square. These promised the best bathroom experience in the entire city. Over 400,000 consumers visited the restrooms in the first year of opening and US sales increased by 14%.

If you have ever been to Dublin you have probably visited the Guinness Storehouse. This is one big brand experience, not a tourist attraction as it’s often mistaken and presumed as. Land Rover has a global brand experience director. They plan to get 2m customers taking part in branded experience events by 2020 offering a range of experiences including Land Rover Adventure Holidays in 42 global experience centres.

Clearly only big brands have brand experience directors. However every company should be thinking about the academic definition as what is really important. What impression does your brand give to your target audience at every touch point they have with it from when people call you, go on your website or even pick up a leaflet or see an ad? Does it fulfil your customers needs better than the competition and are you responsive to that? Spend time thinking on those and you will be further ahead than your competitors.

Tim Youngman is Director of Marketing for Archant 

Marketing People vs the World (again)

A piece of research I read this week once again did what it was supposed to and challenged my thinking about how much I really know about our customers.

The research was a survey of 1,000 consumers and 350 marketers. It looked at what marketers think consumers do and think and then the reality of their actual behaviour.

For example when asked for what was the preferred channel of communication for customer service was, the sample of marketers thought that 8% of people would want to use Facebook and 7% Twitter. When they asked the consumer sample, the reality was only 2% would use Facebook and a mere 1% Twitter. The traditional channel of email was vastly under rated by marketers with 17% thinking people would want to use it versus 32% of actual consumers who said they preferred it.

A similar disconnect was highlighted when both sets were asked about which devices were used to access the internet. The marketers thought that 18% of consumers would use a tablet and 23% a mobile. Again the reality of consumers was of the 1,000 only 6% used a tablet and 9% a mobile.

To be honest I was not really surprised by the results because as a profession we are regularly at fault of jumping on whatever the current bandwagon is. In our defence this is normally driven by the continuing pressure to innovate and be thought leaders. Likewise, if you walk round a marketing conference delegates are usually dripping in new shiny tech toys compared with the people they then go to try to market to.

Most of us who work in a business that sells products or services will know our own products exceptionally well. We know our own industries well and our competitors and their products. However when it comes to our own customers there can be a difference between what we think their behaviour, views and needs are and what the reality actually is.

So all this just highlights a very simple reminder. Understanding your customers, their wants and needs and how you can help them achieve them will help differentiate you from your competitors. Research, in what ever form you choose to use, from studies to simple chats over cups of tea, is always worth the investment.

Tim Youngman is Director of Marketing for Archant

The beauty of basic business principles

This week I had the pleasure of hosting the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce “be better online” conference. Around 100 delegates from businesses across Norfolk and from numerous market segments descended to the Forum. All with the aim of learning some new tips and techniques that would help them improve what they were doing online and give them what all businesses want: an edge over their competitors.

As well as being an honour to host these events, I too sat with the rest of the delegates writing notes and picking up ideas that I could bring back to Archant towers and implement. I was not unduly surprised that from the varied speakers talking about such subjects as content marketing, search, social and email marketing there emerged some common but essential principles.

Too often companies undertake activities, especially online, without any goals or KPIs to check against. “We do social because we ought to” is not a reason. Have a proper plan with targets and goals and measure yourself against them and don’t be afraid to change if you don’t hit them.

Make sure you understand what your customers are doing on your own sites. For example it could be that your audience arrive on your site not on the homepage but a different landing page but unless you check your analytics data you cannot use that knowledge to your advantage. While you are doing that you should also make a point of understanding what your competitors are doing and see if you can do it better or differently!

Use content in its different forms to show people how great you are, don’t tell them. Use your own product and market experience to set yourself apart from your competitors. Finally a theme across all the day was my old favourite that applies to everything: test, learn and refine.

These simple rules may seem like common sense but are often forgotten by businesses. The value of a conference is not always in what is said but the chance to remove you from the rush of modern working and remind yourself that basic principles apply just as much to the digital world as to the offline world and arguably more so.

Tim Youngman is director of marketing for Archant

Microsoft and Nokia - a new dawn or an inevitable sunset?

The recent announcement of Microsoft acquiring Nokia’s devices business for £3.12bn did not generate anyway near the level of hype and coverage if it had happened 10 years ago.

Why? Well four years ago Nokia’s smartphone market share was 30%, now it’s 8%. Right now 90% of all mobiles work on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms, Microsoft’s windows share is 4%.

Although Microsoft also bought the right to licence Nokia patents and the Lumina phone brand. Nokia will continue to operate as a network and tech company and still owns the Nokia brand.

It’s that brand point which is the most interesting thing to me. From nowhere Apple launched a mobile phone and within a few years dominated the market. It was quickly joined by other manufacturers using Google’s Andriod system such as HTC and most notably Samsung.

These handsets sold not just because of the technology, as much as how they were marketed. Apple made the iPhone aspirational, desirable, you had to have one. Samsung has taken that mantle over, especially to the under 25 market who now view the iPhone as the phone owned by the older generation and so not cool. Even Blackberry had some status driven by its BBM messaging system and its use by celebrities. Nokia phones were just functional and that positioning does not sell in the millions.

Technologists would have you believe that you need the next phone because of all the cool things it will do. The reality is that phones became an accessory like a handbag or a watch. When they did, they moved from selling based on functionality to selling based on desire. Those companies with marketers who know how to create that emotion through marketing and brand messaging won. Those with no track record lost.

If you want proof that marketing is something all companies should take seriously it was noted that Samsung and Apple were estimated to have made £3.2bn profit on their mobile sales in the second quarter of this year alone. That just short of the total paid for Nokia, that’s a lesson in itself.

Tim Youngman is Director of Marketing for Archant 

Marmite and Advertising - you either love it or hate it

Advertising, you either love it or hate it, well that’s the idea anyway. Advertising is supposed to create some sort of emotional reaction. The Christmas John Lewis ads are great examples of this. Whatever it does, it is supposed to do something, especially sell you the thing the ad is about.

Occasionally ads provoke such a strong response that people feel that they need to complain. The all time favourite case studies of this are the Benetton campaigns of the 90s. However right now a new campaign from Unilever for Marmite is doing exactly what the team there and at its ad agency hoped.

If you have not seen the TV ad or posters, the current Marmite “cruelty” ad spoofs the work of animal rescue workers. In the TV ad Marmite rescue workers go into houses and rescue unloved jars of Marmite left at the back of cupboards and take them to a Marmite rescue centre to be re-housed.

However not everyone understands the definition of irony, and the ad has received hundred of complaints that it “trivialises” the work of animal charities. This though has had the opposite effect to what the complainers wanted and exactly what the Unilever brand team dreamt of. Lots of industry praise and more importantly a “significant” uplift in the YouGov Brand Index recall survey.

Now let me tell you I unashamedly both love this campaign for its sheer amusing genius almost as much as I love eating Marmite on toast. The creative concept is brilliantly clever and funny. It’s like no other campaign right now and continues the “love it or hate it” theme of recent campaigns. It’s a brand statement that no-one else is prepared to try, helped by the nature of the product. They are even so strong in keeping on message that the final image is of a small boy eating marmite with a face that shows he clearly is a marmite hater. Can you imagine a chocolate ad where the person spits out the chocolate in disgust at the end?  Neither can I this campaign is aimed straight at its loyal target market who love the brand and what it stands for and that’s why it’s a “love it” from me.

Tim Youngman is director of marketing for Archant