The future of the B2C relationship

While going through the medicine cabinet at home, I saw about eight bottles of vitamins - all different brands. It dawned on me, there is a real lack of brand loyalty in this world. We all love that word 'new' and hate that word 'old'. We seek new products because we love that first trial.

There really shouldn't be any loyalty when you think about it. We would walk into a pharmacy and they would recommend a particular brand of vitamin, and you would think, that if we trust one product in a brand's range, we would trust them all.

With the rise of local 'chemist's own' type brands, it seems people are starting to question why they are perhaps paying another $5 per bottle to get Cenovis Vitamin C, rather than $5 less for a homebrand product. Are they simply just paying for marketing? Or quality?

There is a fantastic episode of Seinfeld where George and Jerry enter a drug store and pick up two containers of what appear to be similar products. They jokingly compete with each other reciting ingredients with one manufacturer having less of one particular ingredient and one having more. The fact that neither knew which was better for them really enscapsulates the current relationsihp that consumers have with pharma brands - there is NO TRUST. That scepticism that we all have may just be the reason why there really is no loyalty in the pharma industry.

The Gruen Transfer looked at this industry with a fine comb recently and really tore it to pieces. Advertisers make outlandish statements about their products and trick consumers into thinking that they need to buy a particular shampoo because it removes 97% of dandruff instead of 96%. So it really is no wonder, that they don't trust these companies.

So maybe - what these brands need to be doing - is incentivising their customers. Consumer loyalty programs seem to be a thing of the past. But my belief, is that they will become increasingly more important over time, given how cluttered our supermarkets and pharmacies are at this point in time. I don't need 34 different shampoo brands, I need one.

I really see digital advertising as being the pivotal medium to facilitate the growth of the one-to-one B2C relationship. Recently, a blogger in the US wrote about his dissatisfaction with the service of Dell Computers. Dell trolled the web for these comments, acknowledged their flaw, and compensated for their lack of service by sending the unhappy blogger a new Dell computer with a customer service guarantee.

What advertisers needs to do is give consumers an extra reason to purchase their products. Given how homogeneous most of these products are, they need to be thinking about added value - monetary or non-monetary.

First of all, by giving your consumer added value, you may be starting a conversation. Once you have them hooked, not only can you then continue to incentivise their purchases but also talk to them, gauge their reactions on new product releases, get their feedback and actually start to LISTEN to the people who actually want you to hear them

Advertisers should be setting up online portals that facilitate this direct relationship. All their media, both digital and traditional should be driving to this. I see this as being a more relevant area for those industries with particular homogeneous product offerings - banking/finance, health/pharma, FMCG cleaning products.

Here are just a few ideas of how an advertiser can give a consumer added value
- Give them additional volume of product
- Discount their product
- Invite them to take part in a customer survey in exchange for discount or additional volume
- Invite them to be part of a consumer forum perhaps in an exotic location (all expenses paid of course)
- Set up a competition for consumers to come up with a new name for a new product
- Let these consumers be the FIRST to try your new products - have an exclusive product launch party

Anyway, until next time, say hi to your mum for me (or something along those lines)

Value in Social Media

The recent AIMIA Social Media workshop I attended really got me thinking about the way in which advertisers are truly utilising the value of social media.

For starters, we live in a world where every consumer wants to consume content when they want, how they want and where they want. We all love that feeling when the MSN Messenger/Hotmail notification pops up telling us that we have a new Facebook notification. Has someone written on my wall? Has someone invited me to an event? Has someone from the past, perhaps an old school buddy, asked me to be their friend?

Do Tooheys want me to sell beer to my mates? Does a radio station want me to tell my friends I am a proud listener of their morning show show?

Has a brand asked me to be their knight in shining armour?...

You get the jist. As humans, we all take pride in the brands we consume, otherwise, we wouldn't be consuming them. I am more than happy for my friends to know that I wear Tsubi jeans, or that I love the crisp taste of Super Dry, or my favourite film is Knocked Up. Right now, the Facebook guys in the US are just starting to take advantage of this on a very basic level with granular keyword targeting allowing advertisers to buy relevant keywords listed on a user's profile page.

Contextual targeting is here to stay. Clients especially love the ability to ambush a competitor's keywords. But what we are not doing and should be doing is really getting consumers excited about working with brands through social media. I am talking about a direct relationship that is BENEFICIAL FOR BOTH PARTIES.

Let's take a banking client - say Commsec. Where all banking and finance clients currently FAIL is that they lack the ability to resonate with my generation. At the end of the day, all I want from a bank is that they keep my money safe and they grow it. In fact, I'm with NAB - not because I've been saturated with advertising, but because my mates recommended their Student Saver program when I was at uni. More often then not, especially with financed related products, we seek influence from our friends, family, work colleagues etc.

Imagine a social ad that tells your friends - that not only are you with NAB - but NAB helped you buy your first car or that NAB helped you put a mortgage on your first home. TV ads that try and portray a similar scenario have one thing lacking. If you don't know the people who were helped by NAB, why would you trust them? I mean after all, to most people, NAB are just a big conglomerate out to rule the world.

The fact is that advertisers can leverage a consumer's trust in the people closest to them. This is why social media is such a powerful tool and for many advertiser's, will be the primary source of media spend online in the not too distant future.

In the last month, I've had about ten friends buy the iPhone. How do I know? Well they told me on Facebook - either through their status notification or their excited wall post talking to me as if they have just won the lottery.

Julian Cole, ex-digital strategist at NAKED brought up an interesting point about starting a conversation, listening and then responding. He is spot on. However, my question to him is, as an advertiser, how do you truly end a conversation? Consumers are not going to interact with your brand forever?

I would like to also add that my belief is that in all three stages of the social media process, the advertiser has to really give the consumer something of value. Value in social media is CRUCIAL. Without value in social media, there really is no point.

A perfect example of an advertiser utilising social media by truly giving value to its audience was a youth brand I worked on. . I had the pleasure of actually working on this campaign in late 07/early 08. They came to us with a brief that screamed 'Facebook'. Their primary objective was to increase audience numbers with trial for new users via online streaming. Working with the client and media, we came up with a simple Facebook application that utilised RSS feed technology. We "tuned into their world". Music is such a powerful tool and we saw an opportunity to give the user something of value. We gave the user the opportunity to stream music live to accompany time spent within the Facebook network. These users were spending up to 30 minutes each time they would log on.

We gave them the tools to do it via the Facebook Application which allowed them buy the most recently played song on iTunes, enter competitions, request songs and so on. As the media agency, our job on top of giving a solution on ways to interact with their potential audience, was to drive relevant traffic to their solution. Without significant media spend behind these campaigns, they will fail. Luckily, the client invested a solid volume of media

To me, the reason why an advertiser like Fantastic Noodles failed is that they expected consumers to interact with their brand without giving them the tools to do so. They also believed that consumers would willingly 'pimp their kettle'. They were wrong.

Social media really is such an exciting phenomenon and I cannot wait to see what the next generation of clients do online.

While my first blog may lack quotations from trade press OR insanely exaggerated statics that normally come across as a numerical wank, I just thought I would get my opinion out there.
I'm not saying I can change the world - but hopefully someone agrees with me.

Until next time - say Hi to your mum for me (or something along those lines)