Shift Happens

Focus groups have always been an eye-opener for me, and the regular statements like "What the hell was that crap?!", have been sobering, but if you ever wanted an even more disheartening experience, let a group of 20 something's interact with your new online brand experience.

If it's not cool, it's done for, if it doesn't entertain, it's crap, if it's unintuitive, they can't be bothered, if it's too slow to load, they reject it with a dismissive click. But in a recent focus group we hit on something enlightening. We were presenting a simple concept designed so consumers to rate their dentist and give feedback on pain levels cost and quality of the dentistry work. One individual began to talk enthusiastically to their neighbour about how great an idea it was and said she would evangelise this to their tight circle of friends.

We discovered later she had a toothache, was in pain, but had yet to find a dentist she was comfortable with. We had hit her therefore at the perfect time, with a problem we could solve, and it got us thinking how we could leverage a brand effect out of such an experience. What brand impact we asked would a company that sells pain killers, experience for example if they had developed and branded this service? Would the fact that their site had assisted in elevating her pain by connecting this lady with a dentist quicker have an effect on the brand and ultimately their sales?

We believe it would, and saw it as a perfect example of a possible win win marketing swap where the consumer's time was exchanged for positive brand exposure. It's the ultimate in soft sells. The fact that the brand does not directly benefit from delivering a customer to a dentist is not important, it's the brand that benefits from being there when a customer needed them, and empowering them with a service that was useful. This must be more powerful than the usual landing page or special offer page. More importantly it's hard to imagine any other media achieving anything like the same brand effect, at a comparable cost.

Interactivity is a powerful tool for eliciting an immediate response from an audience and we should definitely still leverage this. However this response should be just the beginning. Remember you watch TV, read newspapers, listen to the radio, but you USE the web. We need to shake off the tradition ad culture of immediacy, and the 30 second sell, and think about how interactive platforms can pull in, engage and hold consumers, and help brand objectives. This online experience can be the immediate proof for your customer behind the brand promise. But we need to also understand the flip side, that if done poorly it can erode a relationship far faster than weak executions in traditional media. If we continue to view it as advertising, it will need to be advertising so good; people embrace it as a service.

The dentist site idea is still an untested example, and I recognise that the audience is small, but the germ of an idea and how we could expand this approach to online branding is there. Think of a nappy manufacture who focuses on the topical concerns of young mothers. Rather than telling mothers their nappies absorb more than competitive alternatives, they offer a service which lets them find or swap kinder Garden spots. Or for an office supplier targeting secretaries working in the city, is parking a problem, can they offer a car pool website?

Its been called Branded Utility or the Value Exchange and has been defined as a way to deliver an interactive service that empowers the target audience. It's when the focus is purely on the needs of the customer, and when you move your scope to this sort of thinking you find that that engagement is more likely.

Consumers will increasingly measure the internets value by its ability to deliver convenient quick access, to what they need, when they need it, and by what it empowers them to do. Brand advertisers will have to leverage this fact and deliver the right experiences to the right customers at a cost that enhances long term profitability. The only way you discover the right experience is to understand the how and the why their customers use the internet and what services could they utilise that would deepen the relationship. Only then will you experience interactive brand Zen.

source: Digital Ministry

Branded Utility:

Brands being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch.

Excerpts from an interview with Benjamin Palmer from Barbarian Group:

The idea of brand utility also comes from the fact that it’s no longer a one-way street when it comes to creative and strategy in advertising today. That’s been the case for online for a while. Consumers want dialog.

It’s where the brand creates a commitment to a relationship. It’s where the brand creates something useful to you, something that’s a utility in your life. The consumer will feel more confident with the relationship if the brand will continue to be part of your life.

A traditional one works in paper format in Europe. It’s the Via Michelin – maps and guides to places from the guys who make tires. The guides are tangential to the product but they were developed when people started to own cars and were beginning to travel outside their towns and villages.

Excerpt from an interview with Johnny Vulcan from Anomaly NY, on Branded Utility Strategy:

Be good. Produce good products, that provide customers with real value and deliver them in useful, thoughtful and interesting ways. In the long run its will be far easier than producing mediocre products and services and then putting pressure on communications to deceive the people you want to become your customers. Advertising shouldn’t be used as a band-aid for a poorly thought through product.

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