Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Remember the Tipp-Ex Bear? A campaign that was lauded for its ability to garner millions of views of Youtube, allowed people to interact with the brand and created awareness for the Tipp-Ex and rejuvenated the brand. Effectively, the attempt was to reposition the brand from a routine category to an entertainment category brand. Watch their case study, if you don’t know it.

If the idea was to entertain millions of people for a few weeks, it certainly worked. According to the agency’s case study film, sales went up 30%. Assuming this is true, it was a stunning sales success. However, the question remains: did it solve the business problem in a sustainable manner?

In a world that is more and more digital, correction fluid simply has a more fundamental business issue: no one needs it anymore. And, while the campaign did create awareness, it did not credibly claim a new territory for the brand in which its new role in a digital world became apparent to people. Even after this case study, would you look to office supply companies for entertainment? Probably not. As a result, people still do not know why they need the Tipp-Ex brand.

Along comes Edding, another German brand with pretty much the same problem. Highlight markers, too, suffer from the same business issue as our working lives become more and more digital.

Edding, however, choose a different route. Highlighting text with highlight markers, just like correcting type with correction fluid, is a routine office behavior, not a fun entertainment behavior. Instead of trying to reach awareness through entertainment, it focused on a competency the brand credibly had in analog times and brought it online. In other words, the brand is trying to solve the problems people have at the office and make their lives easier, just as decades before.

With their digital highlighter you can highlight text on website, save articles as PDF, share them on twitter or facebook. The website still calls it a “release candidate” and I hope Edding will include Dropbox, Evernote, delicious and other existing services, if they want people to actually use it. However, strategically, this direction tries to credibly solve for their business in the business they are in, instead of pretending to be something they are not.

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via uncrunched

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via Dirk Schönfeld

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Check out a good dozen logo evolution such as FIAT’s on Retronaut.

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Interesting example of providing game dynamics in what is usually a “Gimme Number 3 without Anchovies” process:

Via Dustin Rideout

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Apparently, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is doing some PR for itself. The age of social media has led to a blurring of the lines between marketing and corporate communications. In fact, so many things brands need to do nowadays puts even creative agencies in the territory of PR or vice versa.

The change agent being social media empowered consumers, the effort to redefine PR is quite aptly also a social media crowd-sourced effort in which people can submit their definitions on the PRSA website. A new definition (last updated 1982) may be overdue, but even so, the NYT speculates it may also be an effort to disassociate the industry from the notorious PR Eff-ups of the last couple years:

Among the more notorious examples are BP’s mishandling of the aftermath of its accident in the Gulf of Mexico; Facebook’s hiring of a public relations agency to try generating articles that would criticize the privacy practices of its rival, Google; how ChapStick increased complaints about a new campaign, which asked consumers to “Be heard at facebook.com/ChapStick,” by repeatedly deleting negative comments about the ads from the Facebook page; and how Netflix lost hundreds of thousands of members with a plan, later rescinded, to divide into separate businesses.

Nevertheless, I wonder how an official redefinition can help. In the de facto world of the communication business, PR is no longer the top-down message manager of yesteryear. Just like ad agencies cannot be the top-down message creators of yesteryear any longer.

Making this fact official may help in giving the industry a bit of common purpose and feel-good. Something, that ad people have, frankly, been kind of struggling with for their profession as well. How fitting then that its the PR folks taking the lead on this, staying true to the old PR mantra: If you don’t like the conversation, change it.

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Just came across an article on the Washington Post’ Social Reader entitled “Why brainstorming doesn’t work”. I think most of us had the experience of failed or lackluster brainstorm sessions. In agency cultures, usually team-spirit and teamwork are often sought-for and proclaimed character traits that foster believe in a shared process of coming up with ideas. Territorial posturing aside, there are also some other issues at hand, that make brainstorming ineffective, as discovered by a recent study.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem may be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. Researchers asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

The cause might be due to “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise.

I am not sure the topic needed a study, because the insight is pretty common sense. However it reminds one to question the behavior to just pile a bunch of people in a room to create ideas.

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Apart from the fact, that Louis CK is always hilarious, he has some pretty awesome observations on people’s behavior when it comes to social media

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We reported earlier this year of the idea to make make Wikipedia a world heritage by submitting a petition to the UNESCO.

Here are the German Posters. Feel free to distribute and sign the petition (even if you aren’t German) at http://wikipedia.de/wke

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My dear ex-colleague Gerald Hensel has made some smart observations about lifestyle blogging having become such a normal part of brand activation strategies that its use has become somewhat, well, meh. While a few years ago, we would have pushed brands to embrace blogger-vetting of their lifestyle brands for credibility, it has become more and more a questionable practice at this point. Says Mr. Hensel

What was once a crazy and very different (very earned media) way to interact with this strange new world of social media has changed. Lifestyle bloggers have successfully become preferred members of the royal household of major car, fashion, and entertainment brands.

Mr Hensel cautions that this development is just a gradual improvement of our definition of paid media. And, for sure, the “paid media” part of this assessment seems like a correct assessment. After all, bloggers receive goods and services for their voice and reach.

However, I wonder if we should call this an improvement at all? If more and more earned media becomes just slightly improved paid media, we are, in some sense, back to square one, and people will unmask this development, and brands will once again risk their opportunity to create credible content experiences.

Hensel finishes his opinion piece by saying

We have a new class of bloggers. And this new class enjoys the industry’s growing interest in their services and knows what it has to ask for to stay happy.

True. And let’s just remember that these bloggers are where they are not because of the industry’s interest but because of people like you an me. And it is easier and quicker to squander this trust than you think. This fact isn’t helped by the tendency of Brand Management or Digital Marketing folks still inadvertently focusing on blog reach as main strategic metric instead of blog credibility or other grassroots soft metrics. So, when you do you blogger outreach, be sure of how well vetted your blogger outreach actually is with actual customers.

Read the whole thing here.

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