Tag: marketing

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Share A Coke campaign

Great global ideas do not come about easily. There is always the challenge when an idea works really well in one market, but does not resonate with the consumers in another. There is also the misconception of consistency and the danger of adapting global ideas for the local market without taking into consideration of the context, focusing more on the similarities and not the differences.

Traditionally, the narrow definition of a great global idea means the ability to adopt the same message and adapt it for the local market, maintaining ‘brand consistency’ and maximise cost savings. While this is still true in the broad sense, it is no longer enough. Not only the guiding message needs to be adapted, or transformed, to connect with local audiences, in a connected world, the way that the message is ignited is also likely to be different.

A recent campaign of Coca Cola was a good example.

The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was first started in Australia (originated by Ogilvy). Overnight, the much loved, but often overlooked, Coca Cola changed the logo on the bottles to 150 of Australia’s most popular names. It took the entire country by surprised.

The strategic thinking behind the campaign was that for a big global iconic brand like Coca Cola, people don’t find it ‘personal’ enough. The campaign was so successful that it was subsequently launched in markets including Brazil, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and the UK. This year, the China team (working with Leo Burnett Shanghai) adapted the campaign by applying local creativity. Instead of showing people’s names on the bottle, they put the very local and colloquial ‘nicknames’ that are fondly used by Chinese among friends.

icoke_webpage

A quick recap on how the idea has been transformed in different countries:

Australia – the original:

UK: (similar execution for the Netherlands and Belgium)

Greece:

China:

The result is an authentic execution building on local culture and nuances. Not only did the idea travel, but they also managed to adapt it creatively for each local market, so that the consumers felt that the idea was created natively for them.

Each market also had their own way to connect with the people. In Australia, the campaign was activated by an interactive billboard at Kings Cross in Sydney, taking advantage of the digital technology and transfer people’s names instantly through SMS messaging. In China, widely recognised as a mobile-first market, an app was designed to facilitate sharing of the chosen ‘nickname’ to people’s friends via social networking platforms.

Interactive outdoors billboard in Australia:

An app created for the China market:

icoke_app

Such creativity blurred the boundaries between origination and adaptation. I call it creative solutions.

This is the kind of creativity that every successful global campaign requires. Miles Young of Ogilvy Group commented recently that with budgets under pressure, clients aren’t prepared any more to have advertising developed in every one of those markets by local agencies. I also think that a shared brand vision globally can deepen the cohesiveness of the corporate culture internally and maximize the power of collaboration.

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If there were two essential ingredients in creating brand content today, it will certainly be ‘participation’ and ‘sharing’.

Ford announced an updated Fiesta social media initiative that will invite content generated by users. It will not be just a one off promotion but apparently a yearlong activity. It will also be the very first ‘innovative ad campaign created entirely by consumers’ according to the press release from Ford.

Tweet_Ford Fiesta movement

It’s in fact an updated version of the ‘Fiesta Movement’ first debuted in 2009, when thousands of consumers submitted entries to be chosen as one of 100 ‘influencers’ given the keys to a Fiesta for 6 months. These Fiesta ‘influencers’ completed monthly challenges, posted video and blogged about their experiences. The videos can still be found on the current youtube channel.

Ford_become celeb

The updated campaign for the 2014 launch is called a ‘social remix’. On the dedicated website, Ford invites people to ‘Join the movement’. There will be 100 ‘social influencers’ being selected as ‘Ford Fiesta Agents’. The ‘Agents’ will be supplied with a Ford Fiesta and a camera. Curated ‘content’ will be shared through a mix of paid media, social media and experiential events so they can become ‘celebs of the social space’.

It seems to have ticked all the boxes. Elements of participation, user-generated content, channels for sharing, are all contained. What remains is the question of how the process of participation and sharing create meaning for the brand.

Perhaps it’s exactly for this reason, that the new ‘movement’ has some additional refinements:

  • A small percentage of the ‘Agents’ will be reserved for celebrities, current Fiesta owners and alumni, potentially ensuring the quality of the user-generated content to a certain degree.
  • There will be a ‘theme’ each month and a particular mission for the theme. The monthly themes are intended to highlight different features of the Fiesta – essentially acting as a ‘brief’ given to the ‘Agents’.
  • Ford will also partner with American Idol, the Summer X Games and the Bonoaroo Music Festival. Fiesta ‘Agents’ will be given inside access to these events.

The biggest change from the original format is that the new Fiesta Movement will generate ALL of the TV, print and digital advertising for the 2014 Fiesta launch over the summer. Which also means WPP agency Team Detroit will have to use the agents produced materials to create advertising content, potentially redefining the role that a creative agency plays in the process.

It may be unwise to assume people will automatically share any content their peers put out. And the new format seems to have defeated the original purpose of letting the Millennials speak their minds. It would be interesting to see how this campaign unfolds.

I will also like to understand the potential of this initiative being rolled out internationally, from the initial reactions on their twitter feeds I have already observed some interests from consumers from as far as India and Canada, given the global reach of social media I feel that is something we should not neglect. How can this be adapted for your market? Feel free to share with me your ideas.

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For a long time when it comes to international advertising strategy, we often think that emotional advertising would travel better than rational ones. Many people are convinced that certain emotions are shared around the world. Over the years, there were outstanding examples to convince us of this theory. We learnt it from Coca Cola’s ‘Open Happiness’ platform to Johnson & Johnson’s classic ‘Language of love’ brand campaign. P&G’s ‘Thank you Mama’ was destined to go global; and John Lewis ‘The journey’ (featuring the song ‘Power of Love’) Christmas promotion is becoming an annual highlight nationally.

We know for a fact that people don’t like thinking about complex set of choices. Decision-making is primarily an emotional thing. We tend to ask ourselves things like ‘which do I like best?’ first, and emotions guide and simplify these decisions making. Of course we have to understand that not all communication channels need to be emotional driven. Certain media, like TV, is especially good in creating emotions. After all, nobody thinks when they watch a TV commercial, people feel.

A study on the emotional branding in Australia found that emotionally attached consumers purchase substantially more. In fact, brands can expect 40% to 60% greater yield from those consumers who had an emotional attachment with them. In UK, statistics had shown that brands that had successfully created long-term benefits through emotional advertising could achieve 5 times return on investment.

However, are all emotions universal? Can we tap into the same emotion for a brand no matter which market it advertised in?  The answer is yes and no. In a sense that the overriding emotion could be universal, but underneath it the driver could very well be different. The question is, how can we adapt it subtly to make it more relevant to the local culture? As creatives we need to understand what moves local people and what are the contemporary interpretations in order to contextualise it appropriately.

Two recent campaigns from Hong Kong had demonstrated that there are much more dimensions to the ‘basic emotions’ as exploited by some of the most powerful global brands. They tried to go deeper, and found a different angle. They also have taken the risks by only focusing on creating that ‘feeling’ with the consumers, doing something totally different during the ‘gift-giving season’ when every brand is simply putting on a smiling face.

Solvil et Titus, a Hong Kong based Swiss watch brand, had a long history in producing some of the most memorable brand advertising riding on the emotion of love. In the 2012 version it conveys the message that you can’t put a ‘time limit’ when it comes to love. TSL Jewellery’s brand campaign gives the fairy tale perfect kind of love a dramatic twist with the themeline ‘To love, is to love forever’. Coincidently, both brands talk about ‘commitment’ rather than simply ‘passion and romance’.

How do these commercials make you feel? For those of you who don’t know these brands, will the ways how they interpret ‘enduring love’ work in your market? How would you reinterpret it? I’ll let you judge it yourself.

Solvil et Titus ‘100 years’ 鐵達時 「100年之約」

TSL ‘To love, is to love forever’ 謝瑞麟 「要愛，就要愛下去」

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Not sure if it is the weather, or because it’s just that time of the year.

A few major ‘changes’ had made the headlines in the industry press. Here are the news from some of the global brands…

Global Brand-Building Officer of P&G Marc Pritchard said the company wants “fewer, bigger creative ideas that can travel around the world”, the impact will be lower agency and production fees by eliminating some that “don’t add value”. The major cuts will be on the non-advertising portion of P&G’s annual marketing spending, including production of promotion and in-store marketing programs, coupon distribution and eliminating things such as giveaways of stuffed animals. The spending on such promotions that “don’t build brand equity” amounted to around $2.1 billion in 2011.

Unilever is moving its 150-strong London-based European brand development team to Rotterdam while centralising its global brand development team in London – the whole shift will be completed by 2014.

These might sound like just everyday news, but if these are in any way an indication of a trend, and when we think deep into the impact, these changes potentially will shake up the entire agency support ecosystem. It influences how, and where, brand ideas and campaigns/ platforms are planned, created, implemented and fulfilled.

Further down the chain, it will impact every agency of any discipline, and every talent working within.

It will also fundamentally change how we, as creatives, producers and implementation specialists, approach any brief; and how and in what way we collaborate with each other, globally.

I find this exciting.

Could this be the starting point of a revolution? Is it a major trend in the making?

One thing is for certain. I am convinced that we cannot go after quantity, but need to invest in quality thinking and insights.

We all need to be as agile and flexible as possible to take advantage of the fast-changing conditions in the marketplace.

Rain or shine? How would you turn this into opportunity? What will we expect in 2013?

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Sometimes we hope that cultural differences do not exist. Not only can we share the same values, it makes life so much more peaceful.

The reality, however, is never like that.

We are also living in the culture of sharing. What happens in one country, is all very easy to be shared globally.

It has just been reported that in the Saudi Arabian version of the 2013 Ikea catalogue, all images of women, including the photograph credit of a female designer and depiction of family scenes throughout the catalogue, have been mysteriously retouched.

You can see the comparison of the visuals in the below images which were taken directly from the pages of the catalogues in UAE and UK.

This is not just the case of misinterpretation of images – such as the digitally retouched photos of Julia Roberts and Christie Turlington in an ad campaign for L’Oréal (which was subsequently banned in the UK)

The case with Ikea this time is more than that. It has to do with the representation of the role of female in families and society. I am not surprised that it had created such a stir and debate – and rightly so.

For a brand that had consistently scored well from the innovative urban planning projects ‘Ikea-land’ to the widely published and popular catalogue, Ikea’s globalisation strategy had always been a textbook case study. In April 2012, AdMap published a ‘Meaningful Marketing’ report and praised IKEA “makes numerous meaningful connections with people, at an economic, intellectual, organisational, spiritual and emotional level” and had registered on top of the Meaningful Brands Index across all markets.

So what went wrong?

Localisation of marketing communications is nothing new. In fact it is something I am dealing with on a daily basis. Especially in the lifestyle category, global brands do sometimes need to adjust the ‘product’ when selling in a different country. From formula of food products to the message in marketing campaigns, customisation is what is needed.

It is also not uncommon to ‘localise’ marketing materials to fit local cultural norms, we are not just talking about changing the font or layout, but strategically curate it to bring out the best of what the brand is to the local market. What’s ‘design-led’ in one country could be ‘price-driven’ in another.

The lessons learnt from the Ikea case was that the executional treatment was based on stereotypical depiction of a culture. I am quite convinced that the production team involved at Ikea had done this with no intention to offend. It was likely that in this case, localisation has been boiled down to be just a technical process – just doing, not thinking.

Here are 5 tips when developing content for products on a global scale:

  • Implementation cannot be completed without a phase of proper planning
  • ‘Repurpose’ should not be just about execution (resizing, reformatting or retouching), it should be rethinking of the relevancy of the product and message
  • Avoid cut corner solutions. Plan ahead for the production across all markets involved and discuss requirements of additional production, such as photo shoot, for each market. If planning were done upfront, costs will be easier to manage.
  • Plan certain aspects of the production to be done locally with a flexible global guidance, such as sourcing local talent in-market
  • Involve your local marketing team even when the global strategy is coming from topdown

And one last tip – even though there is no such thing as ‘global consumer’, under the watchful eyes of social media, everything is transparent.

What do you think?

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I stumbled upon an image on facebook recently and it had stuck in my mind for a long time. It’s a facebook page of InterContinental Hotels where guests post snapshots of the hotel from all over the world. It’s a fantastic collection not because it is completely from the eyes of the consumers; it also illustrates one interesting thing – the hotel looks and feels so differently in each market.

This got me thinking…how does brand consistency apply in this context? Is consistency really relevant after all? Or perhaps we need to redefine the conventional definition of consistency?

What about global brand guidelines? We often hear branding specialists emphasize that in order to maintain global brand consistency, local markets need to be provided with over-arching guidelines about presentation, logo use, images and tone of brand messages, often in a manifesto or marketing book. However, many of these brand guidelines are over simplifications or generalizations that often have not allowed the breath of thinking.

I think consistency is an attitude. It’s more about the ‘how’ than ‘what’.

Intelligently local

As brands become more national, multinational or global, they realize that not all the consumers in each market have the same needs.  The need for global brands to be transformed and make sure they are locally relevant is increasingly important. In the travel industry, for example, hotel brands have been increasingly adapted to the local needs.

Accor has revamped its Grand Mercure brand in China, offering products and services tailored for local clientele, in a move aimed at taking advantage of the booming upscale domestic travel market.

Grégoire Champetier, chief marketing officer of Accor said “Our clients are now expecting brands capable of understanding the diversity and the complexity of their identity.”

The re-engineered branding for Grand Mercure, referred to in Mandarin as Mei Jue (美爵), was unveiled at the inauguration of Grand Mercure Shanghai Zhongya, the first hotel adapted to the new positioning. The group’s nine other similarly branded properties in China are due to adopt the new identity.

In Shanghai, employees will be conversant in the local Shanghainese language (a dialect that is class-defining in mainland China), and guests will be welcomed by staff wearing Qipao, a traditional evening dress (Think Maggi Cheung in the Mood for Love).

All local staff will be identified with name badges bearing firstly Chinese characters, followed by a pinyin equivalent enabling them to use their given names rather than adopting foreign equivalents.

Other signature services include daily Tai chi lessons, and complimentary head and shoulder massages (Chinese style presumably) for guests staying on premium floors.

The Grand Mercure brand provides Accor with a fresh platform for organic upscale expansion throughout the country. The opportunity for organic growth in the upscale hotel segment in China is one of the largest in the world. Accor’s tailor-made Grand Mercure product has already garnered great support from hotel owners. Accor currently operates 10 Grand Mercure hotels in the country. Accor has confirmed commitments for 10 additional hotels, and announced that it will expand its network to around 65 hotels in tier 1 to tier 3 cities throughout China by 2015.

Authentic global

The concept of globalization often carries a dose of negativity. By definition, globalization means the ‘process by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society’, which indicates the process of standardisation. However, in an increasingly interconnected global economy, many of us cherish our local roots. Some global brands understand that and promote ‘now localism’ in their brand strategy.

Hotel Indigo is what IHG considered to be their nearest to a non-hard brand.

As their CFO of EMEA and head of development for Europe for IHG, Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson, once said “A good brand is one that does a lot of research into what consumers want and designs something around that”. In fact they have put this in practice and bring in the feeling of the locale wherever they go. For example in Liverpool, the hotel focus on the music scene, in Shanghai it captures a strong Chinese-feeling.

Bart Carnahan, senior VP for acquisitions and development of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide once commented on the pros and cons of hard branding versus soft branding: “St. Regis for us is hard-branded—you know what you’re getting”. Luxury Collection is getting close to these white brands, it has some core consistencies throughout those brands, but it gives more breadth to owner developers, so it’s not so rigid. Carnahan said Starwood’s upscale brands have to have local designs to get that eclectic local feeling and the company wants some of the luxury brands to be.

Not just local, it’s your neighbourhood

Going one step further, the notion of ‘place’ is such a core of the proposition that certain brands has gone all out to adapt to local market needs. Statbucks is one such brand. In Seattle, 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea looks nothing like a Starbucks. But, this new café, named after the street where it is situated, is a Starbucks. Starbucks has decided to un-brand it’s newest location in Washington DC. By featuring local entertainment, sourcing from local bakeries and donating leftover food to the local parish, these new un-branded cafés aim to integrate themselves into the fabric of the neighbourhood.

Consumers are turning away from the allure of globalization and massive brands for the comfort of localization. In the US, we stand poised to see the resurgence of neighbourhood. How can your brand capture local character and appeal to consumers’ by providing them with a greater sense of identity and belonging?

Here, I am leaving with you some food for thoughts:

What consistency means in global brand management nowadays? Does it need to be redefined?

If brands need to be localized, what are the impact in the process of creating and implementation of global campaign?

If one-size-fits-all marketing tactic does not work for certain product categories, what are the implications of adapting global ideas for local markets?

What do you think?