When internet turns into reality

31/3 2010

From a brand & marketing perspective Internet is mature. Most companies are very good at using Internet to communicate their products, offerings and believes. This is all great, but that is not where the true potential of the internet lies, the true potential lies in building relationship and trust so that more business can be done with internet as the source.

Internet is not only marketing

Internet today is not only marketing, it is a place that now days is very much like the real world. Most of what we do in a company to reach new potential customers are based on the old cornerstones relationship and trust. That part of the internet from a company perspective have not been utilized in full spectrum yet, not at all actually, it is probably only a few percentage that is utilized from a business perspective.

If caring about your business network is all about human interaction in the real world? You need to re-think. A third cornerstone in the business equation has entered the arena. It is actually something as boring as technology platforms. How come that they are as important as the other two? If you are a great relationship / trust builder in the real world, you now days can do the same online, but then you need to know how to leverage the platforms available online to utilize the true potential to achieve success online. When these three cornerstones work together, great things can happen.

Suit or pyjamas?

Today persons are more and more active online, both as private persons and as professionals……but how do we know when someone sits in a suit in an office or at home in the pyjamas, who cares! Today we all as individuals are the biggest part of the brand. Small nisch companies can dominate markets only because they have great people working for them. They communicate what they care about and what their thoughts on the topic are. They build relationships with potential customers and they collect input to new products and update their business processes according to the business demand from the market.

Is this a new phenomena? No, of course not. It has been done for decades. The new thing is that everyone is as important as the top management when it comes to communication. Executives have done this with their top customers for many years, today everyone can do this, you as a company can have the entire staff act as salespersons and marketeers, not only the ones with that title on their business cards. We buy stuff from people we trust and have relationship with.

Claim your land

This is a huge opportunity for companies that have been in a traditional market. You and many of your competitors have been using the same way to communicate your products and offerings, but now you can really show your competitors why they should choose your product. The difference is in many cases you.

The internet is an undiscovered world for most companies today. We talk a lot about Internet, but honestly not that much have been done in regards to extending processes, building relationship and start to attract new leads to generate further more business to our company.

In the sense there is a lot of land to claim. If we compare claiming land today with how Tom Cruise did in the movie “Far & Away“, where he rides out in the fields and puts a flag in the ground to claim his land (called Land Run). Today there is a great opportunity to do just this online. There are so much land that is not claimed by anyone. The best way to do this is to build trust and relationship within the area you are interested in claiming.

….so let’s go out there and claim your land and build new relationships.

Fredrik Stenbeck

Fredrik Stenbeck is founder & CEO of Silverbakk as well as SiXX, an online communication strategy company.
Blogs: Next Generation Internet
Twitter: @stenbeck

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Bo Bäckman: To be a Superbrand you need to align to the customers Life Situation.

24/3 2010

Your life situation is often more important than brand values and brand image when it comes to your choice of products, because it affects what you can afford and your priorities. Of course you can buy a BMW even with small economic resources – but then you need to cut back on many other things. And maybe your family will not agree with your priorities.

Life Situation:

A chart describing the typical mindset of people in different family situations and with different levels of education.
Family situation affects today – Education affects tomorrow.

An example: Customers with grown up children and a university degree. In other words: FREE AGAIN!

”Lust and money but not always time – many in this life situation still have a demanding working position and thus not always enough time. Can you buy time? Cleaning help (subsidized)?  Many start new culture consumption: Art, theater, traveling, meeting and doing things with old friends (who also have a new time void to fill). Spend more time in your summer house, cultivate your garden or fix your boat. But there might be some worry! Will I get the care I might need, further on? Will my children manage? My grandchildren? The grandchildren might play an important role: To help, to revive the joy and (the tough work) with small children.

The common dominator is that this group has the possibilities to focus on themselves and many think: “My new life starts”. There is will, money, health and curiosity that make you want to spend – on yourself and your spouse. But – you still want to leave something for your children and grandchildren. The situation on the job market is tough today and housing is expensive – you feel that you must help out.

Can a brand use this knowledge? What do theese consumers desire and demand?

·       Buy the cool car you always longed for (but did not have the money for or you needed a spacious car for the family)

·       Move to a Superarea – no need for a daycarecenter – more of restaurants and culture nearby.

·       A new boat

·       Renovate your summer home

·       Buy a flat on the Riviera

·       An adventure travel to Galapagos

·       A great idea – can be to help Al Gore to save the planet

·       A mobile to stay connected with the grandchildren

·       A membership in a wine club

·       A subscription to a design magazine

·       A weekend in London

·       A Superdog

·       And of course all the FMCG:s that make the daily life a treat

Bo Bäckman

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Swedish brands with foreign eyes

17/3 2010

During the 90’s and 2000’s brands were the big thing. The worst hype has folded but branding is not a trend that will blow over. A brand is nothing new, even before industrialization, farmers and craftsmen had what was called renommé, and compared themselves to, or “benchmarked” against one another. A brand is both about the functional characteristics and the feeling and experience. It’s about being relevant to one’s target group and being able to communicate it. Everything has a brand: a country, a city, a person, a company. Stockholm, Stieg Larsson and KTH.

In recent years there have been more and more gloomy reports on how Sweden has been lagging behind in one area after another. Several of the strong brands that have long been associated with Sweden have been acquired and are in danger of losing their Swedish touch. This may be hard on the Swedish national pride, but in practice it does not necessarily have to mean that much. The nation-state is changing, centers of power move, people travel more and socialize and trade more freely across borders. We are undergoing a shift in which it is better to take advantage of developments rather than to stick to something that is not coming back.

Sweden and Swedish brands have a lot to offer in today’s global world. Sweden has a leading position within areas such as social responsibility for people and the environment and our brands can be of great help in promoting these values. Volvo Cars, IKEA, Absolut vodka, Skype, Acne and H & M, some of Sweden’s biggest brands – have much to offer, not least by standing up for values such as social responsibility, human rights and care for the environment. Sweden has the privilege to be an old democracy and the Swedish brand is known to be – and is also in general – more socially responsible. And there is great potential in standing up for these values even from a pure market economy perspective. Social responsibility and environmental awareness sell.

Other areas in which Sweden is considered to be at the forefront is innovative thinking and modern design – even these are areas that sell well. The modern Sweden has much to offer in areas such as music, architecture, design and fashion.

In addition, Sweden is a small export-dependent country and Swedish brands have often early in their development focused on the international market. Although many Swedish brands initially focus on the Swedish market, the step out into the world is not far away. In an international arena countries like China and India will certainly out-compete us in terms of low cost engineering capability, but we can still be at the forefront of innovative development, innovative design, coordination and social responsibility. We can offer what many of today’s customers want.

What Swedish brands, however, could be better at is to realize that branding no longer occurs top-down. The brand communicator is the trustee and her / his primary role is to help steer a very diverse audience toward the same image. The real brand is not always the vision of the company’s strategy – it is the image contained in the target group’s consciousness. A brand is successful when it is perceived as socially attractive to its audience. Brand communicators need in principle to issue a promise to his customers: “We promise to nurture the ideals you believe in, in exchange for your loyalty.”

For Swedish brands, it is about being relevant for today’s global customers – by fully taking advantage of the attractive ideals one can offer to an international market. Partly, it is as simple as just being Swedish.

Liselott Bergman & Joakim Norén

Liselott Bergman is a market analyst at the Swedish Institute. She often focuses on issues regarding the way Sweden is perceived by different target groups. Liselott has a background as a communications strategist and radio journalist. She has also given lectures and held courses on market strategy.

Joakim Norén is a brand developer at the Swedish Institute and works with issues regarding how Sweden should position itself and communicate in the global market. He has a background as a trend analyst and concept developer. Joakim has also undertaken trend research projects at the Interactive Institute.

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Chat don’t fcuk.

3/10 2010

As we all know, the freedom of the Internet has the uncanny ability to reflect the full spectrum of the human psyche. This has resulted in the net having many shady back alleys; we are all just few stray clicks away from a world of illegal activities and questionable behavior.

Add to this a site that allows anyone with a webcam to randomly connect and ‘chat’ with other webcam users from across the world, all of which is done totally anonymously. If you have not already realized it, what I am describing is the latest phenomena to hit the net, Chatroulette. The idea is painfully simple and very scary, go to the chatroulette.com, activate your webcam and microphone, and click ‘Play’ and you are randomly connected to another webcam user, whom you can both see and hear on screen. For those of you who maybe a little hesitant to dive in Chatroullette yourself, then you can check out a great short film made by Casey Neistat. It is an amusing summary of Chatroulette’s audience and not surprisingly Neistat finds that the site is populated by 71% Male, 15% Female and 14% Pervert.

Based on that you would be right to assume that Chatroulette would stay hidden in the back alleys of the net, but its so how gaining mainstream popularity, and attracting the attention of major brands. Enter French Connection.

Way back in 1997, French Connection began branding their clothes “fcuk” the obviously play on the word fuck cause get controversy at the time and took French Connection from a relatively small British fashion retailer, to an international brand phenomenon. Over time the FCUK acronym has lost its punch and ability to shock and due to over commercialization has become mainstream. This resulted in the downsizing the acronym’s role in French Connection’s brand identity in 2009. After which the brand seemed to be moving towards a more over all classical style. This however together with heavy losses in start of 2009, has left the once-edgy brand looking a bit past its best.

As part of their latest campaign ‘The man, The Woman’, French Connection has associated itself with Chatroulette, launching a competition challenging men to get a date with a member of the opposite sex on Chatroulette and if successful win a French Connection voucher for £250. This latest campaign, based partly around a their blog fantastically entitled Manifesto, is a move to reposition their menswear range towards the famed edgy/bloke-ish attitude they once held and in exploiting Chatroulette they have refreshed French Connection’s desire to shock.

The timing of this looks like a marriage made in heaven, not only is this a very cost effective manner in which to capitalize on the buzz sounding Chatroulette, it is also a great way in which to launch the French Connection brand into the social media channels. In short it has all the markings of a successful case for the next chapter of French Connection. Associating the brand with the shady parts of the net is not just a bold thing to do, in this case it also supports the foundation of French Connection’s Man campaign. I my view it is an inspired move that as gives the brand a believable connection with their target audience, if French Connection is asking their audience to “go boldly where no manly man has gone before”, then we can rest assured that the brand is prepared to follow them.

Steinar Danelsen

Steinar Danielsen is the co-founder and Creative Director of Supernative, a digital communication agency based in Stockholm. He works with providing analysis, online strategies, creative concepts and digital identities, for a range of international brands.

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One more time: the brand experience

Do you remember the experience concept? It was launched 10 years ago as a reaction against a boring marketscape in which so many firms’ branding and communication efforts have become standardized and predictable. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore were the main inventors and advocates of this concept, and they talked about an urgent need for firms to rethink their businesses along experience lines.

At the heart of this concept was that the firm should create experiences for the customer – something personal, intensively positive and memorable. Such experiences, it was argued, would serve to differentiate the firm from its competitors. In Sweden, this gained much attention, particularly among retailers interested in developing their retail brands, and they were encouraged to boost the experience content by using their physical environment. Theming the store and adding positive, catchy elements in terms of smells and sounds are some examples.

Yet not much happened. We did not get stores inspired by NikeTown. And we did not get brandlands such as Autostadt. Visit Expert, Ur & Penn, MQ, Nilson, Kjell & Co or many other retail chains – and make an attempt to think away the displayed products. Then, try to find anything in the physical environment informing you about in which store you actually are. This will be very, very difficult.

In terms of academic research, it may be noted that very few studies were carried out to assess the effects of the experience construct. One reason is probably that an “experience” is a very fuzzy construct; in a sense, an experience is just about anything registered by our senses. In any case, eventually even Pine and Gilmore gave up and moved on to launch another buzzword – authenticity.

Recently, however, some researchers have made a serious attempt to revisit the experience construct from a brand point of view – to define it, to measure it, and to assess its effects. Their main idea is that an experience produced by a brand, a brand experience, is not just anything. It is something that affects the customer in four specific dimensions: it should make strong impressions on several senses, it should have affective (i.e., emotional) effects, it should produce bodily effects, and it should have intellectual effects, in the sense that it should encourage curiosity and problem solving.

Having conceptualized a brand experience in such a way, the researchers then set out to measure the extent to which a pretty large selection of brands scored high or low in these four dimensions. And this was possible by using an impressively low number of questions to customers. The researchers also measured customer satisfaction and loyalty for each brand – and concluded that a brand scoring high on experience content indeed produced more of these two outcomes.  The winners, by the way, the top five brands with the highest overall experience scores, were Lego, Victoria’s Secret, iPod, Starbucks, and Disney. Check out the full report, “Brand Experience: What Is It? How Is It Measured? Does it Affect Loyalty?”, in Journal of Marketing (May, 2009).

This, then, suggests that it may be viable to again think in terms of what experience a brand creates for the customer, but to do so in a formal and systematic way. After all, the marketscape is still full of me-too brands with little to distinguish them.

Magnus Söderlund

Professor in marketing, Stockholm School of Economics

Magnus.soderlund@hhs.se, tel 08-736 9541

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