Brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and Topshop have made a conscious effort to recruit shop staff to reflect and deliver their brand values.  Why then am I so bothered seeing, each night on my journey home, a gathering of Topshop’s young trendy ‘experiential marketing team’ hanging out at Oxford Circus all smoking whilst sporting a t-shirt with the brand proudly emblazoned on it?

One of the things I like about Topshop/man is that the staff working there reflect the style and target customers of the brand (OK, so I maybe pushing the upper age limit of being target market, but still).  This may not register immediately with the average shopper when they’re making their purchase decisions, but I’ve no doubt that subconsciously they feel more comfortable about asking for assistance and shopping in locations where people who look like them work.

Essentially this means that Topshop’s retail assistants could be seen as their experiential marketing staff.  They’re integral to the look and feel of the shop and delivering the brand experience to customers.  Being a brand ambassador doesn’t start and finish within the four walls of London’s biggest shop however, it starts and finishes when the branded t-shirt is put on and taken off.

Smoking has taken on a pariah status amongst many today, me included.  I have friends of both sexes and various ages who won’t date people purely on the basis that they smoke.  If this is an important consideration for them in regards engaging in one type of relationship, it begs the question of how it affects them in building others too e.g. the relationship between the brand and customer.

While I don’t necessarily have the same strength of view as some of my friends on tobacco, seeing Topshop/man staff lounging about smoking and flicking their fag butts into the street does considerably take the gloss off my impression of the brand.  Being involved in representing client brands myself, both individually and through experiential marketing staff I manage on a client’s behalf, I’m always extremely sensitive to the behaviours displayed at all times.  I wonder what Sir Philip Green thinks?

By Malph Minns on October 2nd, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Experiential marketing

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The Internet has revolutionised the way music is distributed and considerably weakened the power of record labels.  To add to the record companies’ pain Oasis has now come up with another innovative way of getting their new music heard - commissioning buskers to play tracks from their latest album. 

Oasis had to cancel their New York gig after Noel Gallagher broke his ribs when a ‘fan’ stormed the stage in Toronto and pushed him over.  They have now taken the unusual approach of using buskers to play four tracks from their new album (Dig Out Your Soul) at a variety of New York City locations.

Filming these performances may draw some attention, but I’m not sure employing what is essentially a cover band will endear the music to either current or potential fans.  It’ll be interesting to see how they broach the challenge of actually letting people know that the tracks being played are even Oasis ones.

By Malph Minns on September 12th, 2008

Tags: Experiential marketing, Music

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Attracting the attention of the target audience, getting the message across clearly and having that message seen in a positive light are all important factors in any marketing communication, whatever the discipline.

For me one of the masters of such effective communication was Don LaFontaine.  You probably don’t know his name, but you’ll almost certainly recognise his voice.  Don voiced more than 5,000 movie trailers and I was sad to read today that he’d passed away after an ongoing illness.

Based on contracts signed, he was considered to be the busiest member of the Screen Actors Guild ever. “In a world where” getting your message to cut through the clutter is getting harder, I salute you Mr Don LaFontaine - may you rest in peace.

By Malph Minns on September 3rd, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Film, Television

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As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the “glitch” Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all.  This is a classic example of taking time to understand your online audience and getting digital marketing right - as the 1.5 million people that have so far viewed the clip can testify.

As I said in my earlier blog ‘Sponsorship’s need for a more creative approach to digital marketing’, “users want ownable and original content with a talkability factor” - and this video from EA SPORTS has that in abundance. 

You’ve only to look at the comments on YouTube to see what a positive effect this video has on even the toughest audience - as YellowOnline says “LOL, I don’t like EA these days (”Quantity not quality”), but this is a brilliant ad.”

I’m sure every brand would like such positive comments from both current and past customers.

By Malph Minns on August 28th, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Digital marketing, Golf, Sponsorship, Tiger Woods

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Nowadays there doesn’t seem to be a sponsorship in existence without a digital presence. From the early days of a fleeting mention, or if you were lucky a whole subsection (though often buried), on the main corporate website, we’re now into the era of the dedicated ‘sponsorship microsite’. But has that much really changed?

While investment in sponsorship microsites shows positive progress and a commitment by brands to invest in the important digital marketing space, it’s also created a beast. What we’re now seeing are a raft of generic websites with the same tired format and content.

What do I mean by this? Well let’s take the Heineken’s Rugby website as an example – just one of many I could have picked. As aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate as it is, with the brand ambassador’s blog, gallery, competition, downloads, newsletter, polls, stats section etc you could strip out the Heineken name and replace it with Castrol to make their Euro 2008 site.

Users want ownable and original content with a talkability factor. They’re more than happy getting news, images, polls etc from sites that do it very well and that they have a strong relationship with, like BBC Sport. The online audience are creatures of habit and for them to start consuming generic and available anywhere content on sponsor’s sites will take a long time, no matter how much is spent on SEO. As Ciaran Norris at Altogether Digital tells me “The old adage ‘you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make it drink’ rings true here. Chances are the horse is happy drinking where it is thanks.”

Creating a sponsorship microsite should not be seen as a solution in itself to the question of ‘what do we do online?’ To be honest this should never be a question in the first place, any activities should be done to solve brand problems and not fill media space. Anyhow, if we look at this offline for a moment, a brand wouldn’t start a new TV channel to reach a specific audience at a particular time. They would advertise or devise a branded content solution on an existing channel.

Sponsors and their agencies should be using this knowledge to their advantage. Heineken, for example, may be better served by using their sponsorship assets creatively to engage with the plethora of established rugby websites (e.g. Planet Rugby and Rugby World to name a few of the 115,000,000 websites returned when you type ‘rugby’ into Google) producing something akin to the highly engaging and successful Landrover rugby advert with Josh Lewsey.

This original content has great talkability and as a result is all over the web on video sharing sites, rugby blogs etc and I would hazard a guess has been seen by more people than the average sponsor’s website – as well as elicited more positive feelings towards the brand (though maybe not by football fans).

Even the most popular websites crave creative and original content that will help differentiate them from competition and the syndication of content I’m talking about is nothing new. The BBC has being doing it for years, and very successfully. As Ciaran says in his blog ‘The magic penny of giving content away’, the “…assumption of “build it & they will come” simply doesn’t hold water any more.”

So am I saying that all sponsorship microsites are a waste of time and money? No I’m not. There are many opportunities for brands online, especially those sponsoring less mainstream sports like snooker, where the online community infrastructure is in its infancy and crying out for investment. What I am saying though, is that more time needs to be spent understanding what online consumers want and how they behave as well as considering what’s already out there. It’s important to appreciate that building a relationship with your target market will take time and won’t happen as soon as the first ball of a tournament is kicked. The audience are fans of the sport first and foremost and need persuading that they should be brand fans too. Telling them the score is not going to achieve this.

By Malph Minns on July 1st, 2008

Tags: Branded content, Digital marketing, Euro 2008, Football, Rugby, Sponsorship

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