Celebrity Juice

There has been a lot in the news about mental health this month.  Which is great all round. Great for those who have battled for years with the stigma of mental health and great for those who aren’t as familiar with it and might gain more of an insight into how it affects people.

As part of the About Heads Together campaign co-ordinated by the Royal Princes, Prince Harry has revealed that he looked to counselling to help with the chaos in coming to terms with the death of his mother. Conducted via an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, the sharing of his loss has generated columns of press coverage, a TV documentary on BBC1, Mind over Marathon and conversations across the country. All great exposure for those charities the initiative supports.

Getting a celebrity, in this case the top of the celebrity tree, royalty, endorsement still remains a key way of spring boarding campaigns into national awareness. Living in an age where millions record their every waking moment, their inevitable interaction with brands, projects and services brings fortuitous opportunities to some and likewise crises to others dependent on whether they like or dislike the brand.  Opinion has always been free, but has never been so valued.

So how do smaller brands, without big marketing budgets compete in world where they can’t afford to buy endorsement or engage the services of clever PR and social media professionals to mould their online presence into a positive rather than a negative? Those stories of organic growth from word of mouth do happen, but how frequently and without contacts behind the scenes?

PR is a long tail game and one which executed effectively certainly helps build credibility, kudos and charm for your brand. Attaching a celebrity to your cause can bring a spike in awareness, and sales, but long term isn’t a strategy for building a brand. Credibility by association is well and good, especially for charities and not for profit organisations, but hanging onto the tails of the hottest thing is not a way to ensure you remain in the action.  In fact, it’s a sure fire way of showing that you are “of the moment” rather than in it for the long term.

Building your own brand values, your own fame – such as trailblazer brands Naked, Apple, Innocent and Spotify – is the way brands build their name and exposure long term. Small brands have the advantage of not having far to fall and therefore can question and query the norm, debate and disrupt and do things differently. Instead of looking for a celebrity to tie your brand values to, look to create your own celebrity though innovation and excitement. 

As Steve Jobs said, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”  I am sure Jobs wasn’t referring to social media when he made this statement but what a brilliant analogy for the modern world of coms. Don’t look to the celebrity with the largest likes, greatest number of followers and smiley emojis but create your own path of followers.  Be the brand that people @mention, be the service that those thank and big up on social media. This is the way that word of mouth spreads. Who doesn’t want to tell their colleague or friend about their “best kept secret”? 

Leave the celeb support to the third sector and embrace your own innovation in your coms. And by doing so get to your end goal quicker by trailing your own pathway.

We are about to embark on a possible house move. After 13 years of living in our Victorian terrace in Brighton, we have decided it's time for a change. “Totally out of my comfort zone” was how my husband described his thoughts on moving to a friend. He doesn’t like change.  My kids are worried about being further away from their mates. They don’t like change.

On another note, a friend of mine recommended reading Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith about behavioural change – which is brilliant and if you haven’t read it, it is definitely one for your reading list.  While chatting to a friend about the book, she told me about a colleague of hers who undertakes change workshops and asks people to spend two minutes concentrating on each other’s appearance. They were then asked to change something about their appearance and reface each other three times in a row.  Out of all the participants there was only one person who added something to their appearance, everyone else took something away. Why? Because for many of us change is equated with the loss of something, not the addition.

Which is why change feels scary. Losing what you know and replacing it with the unknown on a personal level is hard, but normally we undertake these changes as we want to be in a better place and believe that by acting differently, we might be able to improve ourselves or our lives.

On a business level, change often equals fear of the unknown, risk. Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric from 1981-2001 in his book on Leadership introduces the first chapter with the sentence “Too many managers fear change.” Fear risk of trying something different. However, staying still also often means risk. Risk of watching your competitors pass you by, risk of your customers turning to said competitors, risk of team members leaving to join innovative companies...

Yet change is one of the hardest things to implement across organisations.  Especially effectively.  Often changing the way a company works and trying to shift culture and ethos is a seismic shift for many. And even when you have changed the way you think internally, it’s a long way to go to change the way your brand is perceived externally.

Which of course, is where communication comes in.  Getting employees, suppliers, partners, influencers, affiliates and customers to understand a change in your brand takes a strategic approach, an effective communications plan and commitment. There is a need to explain why you are changing and like the participants in the behavioural change sessions, there needs to be an understanding of what you are adding with the change, not what is being lost.  It’s not just about product or service benefits it’s about how that change will affect those who interact with your business.

Change will always continue to be around us – be it as AI changes the landscape of jobs for the future, as the marketplace changes or as economies rise and fall. What is important is communicating the change, showing the benefits of the change to those it is going to affect and understanding that the communication might take different platforms and different approaches for different audiences.

Going back to the behavioural change workshops, change isn’t always about loss. In the majority of cases, change is needed to move forward, and forward thinking is what we all want to be.  Jack Welsh encourages us to “review your agenda continuously” and to do this we need to communicate those changes and take our suppliers, our customers and most importantly our team on the journey with us.  

The Meaning of Life

Companies often approach us as they want to increase their profile and raise their game.  Not unusual as we specialise in marcoms and PR. However, it often becomes apparent quite fast that the real reason they are finding it hard to generate their share of voice, is not that they don’t have the coms expertise, the contacts or the time to devise and implement a marcoms strategy, but more that they haven’t really nailed their organisational purpose.

Many companies start their lives from a brainwave, or the driving ambition of an individual. Sometimes an offshoot of a previous corporate, they have built up their own experience and think “I’ll give it a go on my own’.  As they grow, the mission, the aim, the reason fades as the bottom line, the balance sheet takes over. Effectively their purpose is lost in the drive to make money.

This is often where Antelope comes in. Asked to help a company take the step up to that next level – to give it a boost to take it over the finishing line of the latest challenge, a marcoms consultant is brought in to help support the sales funnel and channel reasons for the sales leads to purchase. And rightly so.

But how many companies stop at this stage and look at what their business is about, what its purpose is, its point of difference, its what and why?  Graham Kenny in the Harvard Business Review talks about the 3Ps of a business – the profit, the problem and the often forgotten purpose.  He talks about the problem driving the purpose. So entrepreneurs start businesses to solve a problem and the purpose comes later.

Sherry Hakimi goes further in an article on The Fast Company website stating that purpose driven companies are often more successful. Why? Because they are authentic, no matter what.  “A purpose mobilises people in a way that pursuing profits alone never will.” Certainly having a purpose in a company helps employees work to a clear and comprehensive narrative she argues.

Yet, it is interesting how many C-Suite and SMTs lose the purpose in the fight for market share. Or fail to stop, assess and revalue their purpose as those factors around them change.

That’s where your marcoms strategy can really kick in. Identifying your point of difference, your key audiences, and potential new ones, looking at your products and services to match your audiences and then refining that messaging is key for any business.  Not just a nice to do, a soft marketing activity, it will give you your reason to shout aloud to external audiences as well as internally giving your teams a reason, a rationale, a point of being, a purpose.  

So far from a naval gazing exercise, at Antelope we believe you should stop every 12 months and do a healthcheck on the purpose of your company, and whether or not that purpose is communicated to your stakeholders, your employees, and of course, your customers.

Five steps coms check:

1.    Is your purpose clearly laid out on your website?

2.    Survey your team – are they in agreement with the purpose of the organisation? And more importantly are their roles and responsibilities working towards this purpose?

3.    Ditto survey your customers.

4.    Ask yourself what was the original purpose of the Company? Has this changed?

5.    Is the current purpose still relevant today?

Collective Communication

I spent a day this week confined to the halls of Olympia at a trade show for those in the learning industry.  As anyone who has attended a similar exhibition will know, they are full of companies showing their wares, those shouting about trends, the latest innovations and a ton of gimmicks - cupcake anyone?

As well as being exhausting for those present across the full two days, they often spark great ideas, put faces to names and hopefully a chance to firm up those virtual deals face-to-face.  As a consultant whose main objective is to represent clients, I am normally looking for the Next Big Thing. Not what someone else is showcasing but what the company I am working for can be doing. 

Having attended a number of similar events over the last few months across different sectors, you begin to start seeing some macro trends emerging. Not surprising when you think that most companies need to think about similar issues - technology, people, profit, etc.  But for the first time ever there seems to be a wave happening in all industries that could influence and infiltrate the way we work.

I have also been reading The Economist's MegaChange 2050: The World in 2050, whose authors touch on four different themes - People and relationships, Heaven and earth, Economy and business and Knowledge and progress - with a futuristic nod to what they think is ahead. 

And to me, it all seems to be coming back to one thing - User Generated Content. Crowdsourcing of intelligence, of ideas. Collective information and collective decisions.

As of the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users. If FB was a nation it would be the third most populous on Earth outside of China and India. So it is no surprise that Facebook is utilising this community not only to generate its own content but also to moderate and filter content for others.  Martin Giles in MegaChange 2050: The World in 2050 predicts what many of us already know that friends’ opinion count and that content will be curated by friends in the future.

However, the change for the future will be in the content that is curated. Moving from baby photos and updates on martial status, the news that will be shared from your friends will be world events, their opinions on these world events and their friends’ comments on their opinions. So effectively friends and friends of friends become the social filter of content.

The Pew Institute claimed that in the 2008 Presidential Election over 20% of US adults with access to a computer used social media as a way of getting information about the candidates and their policies.  Not news sites, not manifestos, but what their friends and influencers thought.

Social media cuts through social-economic status and allows us to talk to people we would never talk to about things we would previously would never discuss with all and sundry.

So what does this mean for brands? And how do B2B businesses work in an environment where more and more people are being influenced by the 360 Effect?

At Antelope, we believe it’s about being part of the conversation and having a voice in the debate around them. It’s about being transparent and realising there will be the naysayers as well as the advocates. It’s about promoting yourself, sure, but also about not being arrogant or cocksure.  It’s about showing your values and getting people to know you, as if they don’t know you, how can they like you?

It’s welcoming your users (your customers) to talk about you and joining in with them. It means being not only proactive in your content, but looking at the content about you and around you and participating in it. It’s seeking out the conversations in the corridors, by the water fountain and joining in.

It means a well planned content strategy and one that is agile and flexible. It means having a genuine voice. It’s a little more complex than the odd blog, the occasional tweet and posting across Hootsuite. That’s why companies who hope to be around in 2050 are already the ones who are not only listening to their customers, but those allowing them to talk.
 

All I Want for Christmas...

So December is edging closer and closer. The John Lewis advert is live. There is a nip in the air. My children have already written their lists to Santa. Christmas is definitely around the corner.  As young innocent faces look with excitement and anticipation at the presents stacked under the tree, their eyes glinting with the fairy lights and advent candles, the question is 'Will they get what they really want this Christmas?"  And if they do get their heart's desire, will it really live up to expectations? Change their life?  Make them better, funnier, prettier, and more popular?

Marketing and communications campaigns can be a bit like Christmas morning. (Bear with me here, it’s not as tenacious as you think).  The client briefs an agency, or a consultant, or an in-house team looking for them to transform the hearts and minds of their customers with a succinct, stylish, engaging and impactful campaign that raises awareness, gets 10,000s of inches of media coverage, is a viral phenomenon and of course, drives their product or service into the number one slot in their market.

However, sometimes, just like Christmas presents, what the client thinks they want as opposed to what they really want or need, is quite different. And often the challenge is getting clients to realise this, understand the gap between customers’ perception and their own and put their trust in a good communications consultant, either internal or external.

A great example of this is clients who tender out for a new website - new branding, new copy, new approach. Often well needed as company websites are like mattresses, well used and often out of date, although essential, often forgotten.  So the client brief explains the history of the company, what they do, who they are, and why they are wonderful. Yet, do they think about their customers’ needs? Do they address these needs? Do they tailor different areas for different audience sectors? Or do they stand on top of the mountain and shout loudly about how great they are? The agency that doesn’t massage the client’s ego, but thinks about the best way to engage with their audiences, is the agency that in the long term will bring the best return on investment.

It is like the guest at the dinner party who sits all night talking about themselves, without asking questions to their neighbouring guest, or even tempering the conversation to mutual interests.  What will be the lasting impression of the guest? A bore. A massive ego. Tiresome. The guest who listens, who carves their conversation according to the interest piqued by certain subjects and who enquires as well as engages will be the one that everyone wants to be friends with when the dinner plates are cleared away.

So back to my Christmas analogy.  If you don’t get what you really want for Christmas, don’t despair, it could be the exact thing you need this Christmas, but just don’t realise it.  Don’t be swayed by the glossy wrapping paper or the branded box, take a real look inside what is on offer.  And if you still can’t see the value, there is always next Christmas. 

Does size matter?

For years bigger was better. The big hair of the 80s, the big houses, the big cars and the big expense accounts.  Being part of something big, made you, well better.  When I left University it was about how to get the best job, in the biggest agency with the biggest pay packet.

Thirty years later, for me,  it’s about stripping back. Finding out what you are good at and focusing on it. It’s not about being the biggest, but just about trying to be the best.  Why bother taking the time and energy offering services that you are only mediocre at when you could be focusing on the things you are really good at?

There is no doubt that there is a rise in people wanting to do things that they feel they are good at, doing it their own way. The Federation of Small Businesses recorded 5.4 million private sector organisations at the start of 2015, an increase of 146,000 since 2014 and a1.9 m increase from 2000.  

However, not being big does sometimes mean it is hard to find your own voice, and be heard in the cacophony around you. Trade publications mainly focus on the big boys, national papers on those companies that have a national presence and money still talks, so bidding for Google Adwords against the big boys often means you will be outshouted and outbid.

So how does a SME make an impact? If big isn’t better, how can we show the world that small can be powerful, as Adam Lent in the book of the same title makes the case for?

It’s about doing things differently. It’s about maintaining the things you do well and improving on them. It’s about competing with yourself and not others. It’s about finding your niche, your bit of gold dust.

I recently ran a key message development workshop with a senior management team for a client. They were tasked with creating an elevator pitch and then pulling out key messages.  What was interesting was that in the initial stab, not one key message was specific to their organisation. If you took away the name of the organisation you could easily replace it with any of their competitors.   

Thinking about what makes you different. What makes your company different isn’t always easy. Even if you do know what makes you unique, communicating it to your potential audience can be hard. As can not talking in clichés, not speaking corporately, and not talking industry jargon.

Yet the process is simple, and the gold dust is normally there within all of us to find. 

It’s about listening to those around you - your customers, your team, your market and your competitors. Hearing what they say and finding your space.

It’s about getting your tone of voice, your syntax, your language right.

It’s about analysing your audiences, identifying the priority audiences and speaking to them directly.

So we believe that size doesn’t matter. Often the only difference between being big and being small is that bigger organisations have more resources to throw at things. Being smaller means you sometimes need to rely on others to help you do the things that you have decided you don’t want to do, or to do the things that others do better than you. And realising that can sometimes be the most powerful thing of all.

Animal Farm

I remember reading Animal Farm for my O levels and being totally fascinated by the evolution of the farm from being farmer led, to the equal opportunities workforce of the animals to a dynamic of anarchy and revolution.

It’s been a long time since I thought of George Orwell’s novel, but it recently bobbed up again in my thoughts when I was invited to a workshop on Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations around self management and wholefulness. For all of you who haven’t heard or read about Laloux’s philosophy it’s groundbreaking and one which everyone in business should read.

The premise is that giving people their own autonomy leads to ownership and pride and through this you get far more commitment, sense of achievement and responsibility within teams and ultimately better results.  Many sceptics that believe that this way of working can only be successful within small to mid sized enterprises have been proven wrong with many larger organisations such as FAVI and Buurtzorg adopting this philosophy and seeing turnaround results and profits.

The key of course to this working is getting the right people, in the right roles. Those who want to lead (as as Animal Farm shows there will always be leaders) need those who want to follow and those who want to take less responsibility need those around them who want to take more.

This has coincided with us undertaking a lot of affiliation work for clients. Matching clients with similar audiences for mutual benefit. Without money changing hands, Antelope has been negotiating value from one company to another - a bit like a modern day bartering service.

All of this has made me think a bit more about a world at work that isn’t governed by money - either the size of the deal, or the pay packet. There is no doubt that companies that rate environmental policies or ethical impacts over the economic outcomes often are the ones that drive customer loyalty and long term success.  But imagine a co-operative approach to work. Bringing what you are good at to the table and trading with companies for what you need. 

There are US sites that offer this sort of service - for example U Exchange and to an extent Craigslist- and I am sure there are lots of informal networks already doing just this, but as far as I know there isn’t a culture within the big corporates. With companies being able to reach out far and wide to other organisations, maybe this will be the future way of working?

It’s not a world I can imagine right now. But understanding and admitting your strengths and your weaknesses and letting others fill the gaps that you can’t or don’t like to do, makes sense.  We all need to be less hard on ourselves and others when it comes to thinking we can do it all and wanting to have it all.

Hot, Hot and even Hotter

We are a nation obsessed with the weather. And as I type rightly so as the thermostat is off the scale at a whooping 33°C.

And predictably as the weather warms so has the content that has arrived in my inbox “Ready for the Summer?”, “The Heatwave is here”, “Get Ready to Bake” (yes that was a cookery related one), etc. Every marketer is poised ready to crack out the sun puns.

But stop one minute. Is that really the right strategy? Does linking your brand to meteorological changes really make anyone more or less likely to buy your wares?  Sure if you are manufacturers of flip flops you might see the sunshine icon on the weather app as an opportunity to ramp up the marketing, but for every brand? 

Whether weather related marketing content opportunities, like seasonal opportunities are right for your brand, is really whether your brand resonates with the season.  There is certain a case for arguing that not utilising holidays and other diary markers that are common across audiences, such as Christmas, Easter and say Thanksgiving Stateside, would be missing opportunities to engage with your customers, but messaging appropriately is the name of the game.

According to a study by Cohn & Wolfe, the number one quality or behaviour which people demand of big brands is “communicating honestly." That means your content marketing, what you say to your customers in your brand voice, needs to be authentic.  Many brand guardians spend £ 000s ensuring this is spot on when they are commissioning adverts and even signing off press releases, but when it comes to their social media or their blog posts, sometimes talking about the weather seems like the best option regardless of whether it really has anything to do with their value proposition.

Of course, it all comes down to finding things to say and making your content of interest, of value to your customers. And sometimes that is hard.  Without forcing your brand down your customers’ throat repeatedly, how can brands really engage with their customers?  At Antelope we believe there are five simple steps to getting content marketing right, “making it real”.

1.    Know your audience
We all think we know who we sell to, but do we really? With an 21% increase of online sales , gone are the days when we exchange products or services face-to-face. Instead are the data days where we can track and gather insights about customer behaviour - use them to know who you are talking to with your content.

2.    Talk to them in their voice
If we had one mantra at Antelope it would be this, “personalise, personalise, personalise.” Remember your audience environment when talking to them - so if they are public sector clients, talk their terminology, if they are a younger demographic, reflect this in your copy. 

3.    Ask them what they what to hear about
To really engage you need to involve - find out what your audience likes, what they do. This can be as simple as asking them to vote on different options that affect your brand or ask them why they like your brand.

4.    Have a conversation with them
Imagine standing at a party and someone talking about themselves all the time.  We have all been there.  Boring, boring, boring.  Don’t just talk about yourself, let others talk too.  A one way conversation is never fun.  And allowing your customers, suppliers or associates a voice encourages brand advocacy and endorsement. 

4.    Reward them for their input
Like a schoolchild in a classroom, some audiences need a reason to participate, a reward at the end of the task. So offer one. Get them to share their experiences, their photos, their thoughts and reward them with product, a discount code, a voucher, or just a shout out.

In this Brave New World, we are all publishers. Yet none of us can be publishers in every section of the bookshop. Being real will build more credibility, more genuine engagement and more customers.

The Cyrano de Bergerac school of marketing

I recently read an article about the future of information and marketing in which it stated that soon we will be paying for people to read our emails and to watch our ads.  This made me laugh out loud. As firstly it sounded a bit mad, and sad, but also with AI and the automation of nearly everything to have someone to do something as simple as read your emails, seemed a bit, well, retro.

What of course the article was implying was as we all reach information overload in both our professional and personal lives, how in the earth do we curate this information to ensure that we resonate with and record the best bits and delete and destroy those of no interest?  Of course, this is the age old marketing dilemma - how to make your email, blog, piece of content really stand out and be counted amongst its competitors.

I also read another blog about making content accountable and how different content pieces served different means. For example, a downloadable white paper might be a great brand driver, add credibility to your brand and increase the profile of the person who authored it, but might not work as a lead generator or a marketing conversion tool. Likewise, a sales email might drive people to your website, but if your landing pages aren’t strong enough might stop those potential customers in their tracks - so tick for brand again and cross for sales lead.

Curation of content and the whys to how and what we do are pretty important and something which I think is getting lost in the race for everyone to have a content strategy.  There is nothing better to have a host of content written and ready to go, but what's its purpose and who does it serve? Does it align to what you are doing as a business, does it reflect your brand messaging and does it have your tone of voice?

There are many clever wordsmiths out there. There are many clever strategists out there. What we need to do is combine the two and make content about the long term. Like courting a partner, we need to woo them in with words that will engage, entice and excite. We need to make them trust us with examples of our credibility and friends' recommendations. We need to make them realise they are special to us - with a personalised approach and an understanding of who they are. And we need to make sure we don’t take them for granted by working at our relationship with them, ensuring we put them first and making sure they know we care.

Apologies if I am beginning to sound like Cyrano de Bergerac giving you relationship advice but content marketing is exactly this - relationship marketing using content. Those who use content as a long term conversation with their clients, rather than a clever quick aside will be the ones who ultimately get the girl and keep their client.

Are you in or out?

If you type in Brexit to Google search it comes up with approx. 8.8m articles all giving their news and views on whether or not we should vote to stay in Europe or opt out.

From a coms view it is interesting to watch the yeas and the nays as they discuss, debate, disagree and denigrate. It is hard to miss the tsunami of media coverage, and yet, ask the man on the street if he really understands the issues, the complexities, what it will really mean to them and I imagine most will be daunted and dare I say, disinterested.

Which is not demeaning the British public at all. In fact, if anything, the Brexit battle, like the London Mayor elections, has filled me with communication fatigue. It’s not the endless speculation and arguments over what’s right and what’s wrong, I love a good debate.  But how the tactics has sunk to the lowest communication denominator - berating the opposition.

The Goldsmith/Khan London Mayor Election race got dirty, with gloves off in the last round and racist sparring from both corners.  Likewise the EU Referendum has turned into a coms strategy of playground politics with the reasons to stay or go lost in the shouts of juvenile ‘don’t pick them, pick me’.

It takes me back to my youth. Watching the party political broadcasts in the 80s. Obviously having no knowledge, interest or engagement at 8 years old (I was no William Hague) to what the men and women in suits were saying, my only take out was the negativity towards the other party.

Antelope is not a political strategy coms consultancy, and I certainly don’t confess to understand the complexities of politics. But surely aren’t brands today (and let’s not forget that is exactly what the pro or against parties are whether it is Brexit or the London Mayor elections) better drowning out the opposition’s negativity by concentrating on what they do well, and keeping the conversation about their points of differences to their audience rather than highlighting their opponents and countering them at every turn? 

Sure we need to put our head above the parapet every now and disagree with ignorance and injustice. But we too need to ignore the white noise of those who disagree and focus on doing what we do well, our bit of ‘gold dust’.  We need to be robust in our strategies, focus on the vision and keep the communications crisp and the conscience clear. The only way to beat the opposition is not to compete with it but to run a different race, on your own terms.