birddog

The BA Brand Up In Smoke?

I was a victim of the wholly unpronounceable Icelandic volcano eruption that shut the airports. I say ‘victim’, but it’s relative. There are worse places to be stranded than Arizona. Iceland for example. In reality, my discomfort was limited to the enforced rationing of underpants. The location in which I was stranded and the consequence of unexpectedly prolonged underpant usage is not, however, my point. I was surprised to find out how much reliance I placed on the brands I trusted and how well, or badly, they responded. It’s these formative experiences that shape an audience’s perception of a brand, so they’re important. Like pants.

My Flight was booked with BA. Any organisation that you enlist to carry you and your loved ones at a height of thirty thousand feet has to have a trustworthy and reliable brand. Despite industrial action a few days prior to our departure, our outward flight was unaffected and we had a great 2 week vacation.

The morning that we were due to fly back, my wife received an email from BA announcing that the Flight was cancelled due to the volcano. Not ideal, but at least we received the email. It offered no details about the eruptions, but gave 2 phone numbers (in the US and the UK) and directed customers to rebook their flights on the BA website. That was the ‘ordinary’ response to a cancelled flight but BA clearly didn’t have a plan for ‘extraordinary’ – certainly not one that they were able to share with me.

So with British airspace out of bounds, we were on our own and, basically, screwed. The BA website wouldn’t allow us to change flights and, contrary to the email, the website continued to show our flight as confirmed and checked-in. The UK number simply didn’t work and the US number provided an automated service to nowhere followed, intermittently, by a call-holding system. I’m not sure when the last time you were ‘on hold’ for 2 hours was, but you’ll appreciate that with two small kids in the room, a wife doing her nut and housekeeping banging on the door, it’s not good.

During the 13½  hours it took to get through to the call centre, and the subsequent eight days I had to wait in Phoenix for the return flight, I had time to reflect on the power of brand perception. My considered wisdom is this – it’s all in the mind. BA has spent millions persuading me to trust BA in preference to other brands. It worked, because that’s what I did. But it’s when the shit hits the fan that you really need to manage customer perception and brand reputation. Reputations that have taken years to build can be blown in an instant. Or 13½ hours.

I have no doubt that in the UK, the volcano, the closure of British airspace and the impact on the beleaguered BA share price was daily front page news, but in ‘Pleasant Valley’ Arizona (really) I think it would be fair to say no one gave a shit. I relied on web news, CNN, Twitter, texts and email from friends and colleagues. The news was patchy and unreliable (often conflicting) but it was better than nothing, which is exactly what I received from BA. BA is the one brand that I should have been able to rely on for relevant, timely and accurate customer information. Oops.

The very reason that companies invest in their brands and the supporting digital channels of communication is to shape perceptions in the minds of their audiences. Brands aren’t ‘things’, brands are what people, customers, ‘think’. Brands are the experiences people have and the stories, like this one, they tell other people. In our digital world, those stories can travel a long way. Further than Pleasant Valley. BA fundamentally failed to manage my customer experience and, in the absence of any other input, they have allowed me to form my own perceptions of the brand. So that’s what I’ve done. My perception of the BA brand is now permanently and indelibly etched in my mind.

Does BA still have a brand? Yes, but it no longer has the value or values that are important to me. The trust is gone and without it… well, a plane ticket I can buy from anyone.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

A Digital B2B Future

I admit it. I went to see Miley Cyrus at the O2. Whatever the rumours to the contrary, it was my kids that wanted to go. They badgered me at least once to buy tickets, which, as a dutiful father, I did. I spent the first few tracks ogling a blonde dancer with my daughter’s binoculars, and then there was a pause. The music lowered and Hannah, I mean Miley, addressed her adoring fathers. I mean fans.

“This Summer I had to, you know, get away from everything and everyone and do some growing up. So I made a movie called ‘The Last Song,’ and it was so totally the best thing I’ve ever done. I hope you enjoy it,” she husked. I realised at that point that I’d just been branded.

Miley disappeared and we were all ‘treated’ to a trailer of her new movie on the giant screens. I wasn’t sure I approved. It was like being at a movie theatre instead of a gig. An expensive, noisy, 23,000 seater movie theatre. Nonetheless, we sat there and watched a trailer at a live concert. Everyone clapped and the screaming never actually stopped, but I still wasn’t sure.

Whilst the trailer played on the centre screen, the side screens displayed graphics of the movie logo and the website address – Lastsongmovie.com. Miley came back onstage, sang a song from the movie (presumably the last song) and the crowd went wild.

So what’s the problem? Well, I understand merchandising and promotion. I believe I still have a treasured Thin Lizzy t-shirt from the 1983 Thunder and Lightning Tour that I’ve saved for special. So that’s not the problem. The problem was the line. It felt like it had been crossed – ‘Good Lord! Promoting her movie in the middle of a concert? Outrageous! That’s not what I’m used to. Whatever next…etc.’

My reaction felt familiar and I needed to pinpoint it. I’m pleased to announce (without a trailer) that I’ve remembered where the unease came from. It’s how I felt some years ago when a pimply-nerdy-geek-type told me that traditional B2B communications were dead and that the future was digital. I guffawed, spluttered and muttered outrageousnesses then lay down in a darkened room to sniff some well earned printed collateral. But just because you don’t like it or are unfamiliar with the territory, doesn’t mean it isn’t so.

I’ve had to move at speed in the last couple of years of digital development just to keep up. There are some home truths about online brands that every B2B marketer needs to face, and at the moment, they’re not.

At the recent B2B Marketing Conference I proposed the debate, ‘This house believes that traditional B2B communications are dead. Brands must migrate to digital or face the same fate.’ Despite a compelling rationale, I was roundly thrashed in the voting. I surveyed the audience and, to my surprise, some of the faces looked pretty outraged. How very dare I even suggest that digital will replace the communications that they’ve relied on so stoically for the last decade or more? I had just crossed the line.

But even at a Miley Cyrus gig, the channel of communication was digital. The trailer directed me to www.lastsongmovie.com. I accessed the site using my iPhone and was pointed towards a Facebook page and encouraged to follow the movie on Twitter – all digital.

I mentioned the differences between traditional concerts and the multi-channel, multi-media digital experience of the Miley gig to my nine year old daughter. She shrugged in a completely passive, assumptive way and said simply, “Come on Dad, it’s 2009, what did you expect?” I can’t be sure, but I suspect my face looked very similar to those I saw in the crowd at the B2B Conference.

The line has moved. Expectations have changed. We will all ultimately become old farts and die. The question is how quickly you want to realise that fate. Personally, I left the gig a far hipper father than I went in. Digital, like, so totally rocks. Dude.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

Crowdsourcing for B2B Marketing

I’ve been talking to people (anyone who’ll listen actually) about ‘crowdsourcing.’ They’ve listened to me, mostly, and then looked at me like I’m a twat. So I started to doubt my own visionary forward thinking brilliance and thought maybe I’d best just shut up and sit down. But then again, I’ve never been one to run from a stupidity contest so I thought I’d persevere. In years to come you can all look back and say, “That McKee bloke – genius.” Or, alternatively, “twat.”

Crowdsourcing is a term first attributed to Jeff Howe in 2006, a tech writer for the US magazine Wired. It broadly means using the power of many to solve problems. Rather than rely on a single person within an organisation or even an entire department, whole companies their clients and people you don’t even know can contribute to solving a particular corporate challenge. It’s all served up on the interweb via your website or chosen flavour of electronica (intranet/extranet/landing page/microsite/social media/forum…) and the corporate entity gathers opinion and content from far and wide. Think of the principal of opensource applications and you’re on the right lines. If thousands of developers around the world can freely contribute a little bit of code in their spare time, it doesn’t take long to produce an entirely open/free platform to challenge the likes of even Microsoft. The same principal can be applied to any challenge where many hands can make light work. It’s a bit of a big deal. One that the B2B marketing community has thus far almost wholly ignored.

I’m surprised at the limited adoption in the B2B space because I do believe I’m in love with the whole concept. Brand strategy formulation is all about gathering opinion and establishing a cohesive, compelling story that the audience will believe in. Brands aren’t about guidelines or products or services, they’re about feelings – how people feel about your brand. Rather than being restricted to the views of a few key stakeholders in a workshop and a couple of focus groups, what if you could open up the brand discussion to the people who really matter – the prospective customers – and have the whole world tell you how they feel? Well, actually, you can. How cool is that? And yet, when I offer the service to companies that I understand are seeking that very customer insight, I’m still being given the ‘twat’ look…

There are many fairly dull examples of crowdsourcing I could offer you, but that wouldn’t really inspire or excite. But by relaxing the definition slightly, I can perhaps demonstrate the power of Social Media to shape how companies can affect or be affected by how people ‘feel’ about their brand.

‘United Breaks Guitars’ started as a music video protest by Dave Carroll, a musician who had his guitar broken by United Airlines baggage handlers. United refused to pay for the broken guitar so Carroll wrote a song, produced a video and posted it to YouTube. Google it and enjoy the video. Then think about the Mashable report that the video was viewed three million times in its first ten days of release and almost doubled again ten days later. In the first 10 day period it generated 14,000 viewer comments. Not many of them were very complimentary about United. You can now download the song on iTunes. Dave Carroll was crowdsourcing – using a wider audience to gather opinion and influence brands (his and United’s).

Best Buy, the large U.S. retailer has been using internal crowdsourcing for over a year. Their ‘Company as Wiki’ YouTube video clearly articulates the benefit of empowering staff to contribute to management thinking and processes to improve the brand. A new idea for a store can be conceived by any staff member, posted to the Best Buy site for comment and discussion by other members of staff. The good ideas rise to the top and management are able to fund the best projects immediately. Best Buy is currently considering how to use crowdsourcing for its external audience.

So. I’m ready. Who wants to play? Genius or twat? Let the crowd decide…

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

B2B Marketing Entrepreneur?

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of anyone introducing themselves as an ‘Entrepreneur’. It’s one of those wank words I find impossible to say out loud. Women don’t seem to like the word ‘moist’, but for me, it’s ‘entrepreneur’. Eww. I’m less disturbed when the term’s used to describe someone else. It’s strictly the self-use of the word that bugs me. So, “Richard Branson is an entrepreneur”, is wholly acceptable. “Hello, I’m Bob. I’m an entrepreneur”, isn’t. See what I mean? Wanker.

So when I walked into a client meeting I was relatively relaxed as the introductions were made and the Marketing Director said, “…and this is Bob.” It was only when Bob himself then repeated, “I’m Bob – I’m an Entrepreneur”, that I knew we were all doomed.

I’d been asked to the meeting to discuss social media, something I’m increasingly integrating into on and offline marketing strategies so I was slightly perplexed as to why we might need an ‘entrepreneur’ in the room. Was it just in case a brilliantly creative idea sprang out of our conversation and someone needed to throw money at it? Or maybe if we had a good idea, but suddenly and mysteriously ran out of creativity, we might need Bob to step in and… ‘preneur’ over everyone? His role wasn’t clear. And I didn’t like him. Mainly because of his self-proclaimed title.

I let it go for all of about a minute and a half and then said, “So, Bob, what does an entrepreneur do then?”

There was a pause while he composed his best Dragon’s Den stare and he replied, “I seek the alternative.” I waited for the subject in his sentence, but it never came. That was it. Bob sought ‘the alternative’. I admired the brevity, but I wasn’t really any the wiser. “I suppose people ask you what ‘the alternative’ is quite a lot?” I enquired oh so casually. “No” he said.

Everyone shuffled their papers and cleared their throats so I kind of knew I was supposed to shut up. But that’s never stopped me before and I wanted to understand his purpose in life. “Well, are you entrepreneurial in the social media space?” “No”, he said, “I think social media’s a complete waste of money.”

Now that, I thought, was interesting – for someone who ‘seeks the alterative’. Social media is surely THE alternative at the moment. Markets have changed, audiences have moved, tools have improved, knowledge is being shared and the world is responding to new ‘social’ methods of communication for their brands – we’re all doing at least something in the social media marketing space now even if it’s just blowing the dust off our Linkedin accounts and trying to make sense of Twitter. Of course, some brands are doing considerably more in the social space – they’re using social tools to create very active, vibrant communities online, they’re harnessing customer opinion, influencing perceptions, engaging in conversation and debate, they’re even transforming sales methods, processes and revenues.

Those companies are re-capturing audiences that had been lost to the internet and are finding new audiences at the same time. In a commoditised marketplace, those companies are achieving elusive competitive advantage by staying a step ahead of the competition and finding their social voice. And they’re doing it in truly creative ways – using music, video, photographs, conversation. What’s ‘the alternative’ anyway – another brochure? Really? Is that really going to work this time around when it hasn’t worked for the last couple of years at least? The companies that will survive and accelerate through the recession are learning to balance traditional communications strategies with the social mandates of their audiences. If the customers want it – you’d better deliver it. New, inspired, thinking and brand development starts when digital and direct strategies are properly aligned and it’s the steps forward in social media that are truly… ehh… “entrepreneurial”. Oops.

Naturally, I regurgitated those thoughts in a demented stream of consciousness mad professor kind of way and only stopped to draw breath when spots started appearing in front of my eyes and I thought I was going to faint. Waste of money? My arse. In the last 12 months the current British Government has increased the Gross National Debt by more than the combined total of Governments over the last 300 years. Now THAT’s a waste of money. I dunno – somehow I expected an ‘entrepreneur’ to know the difference. Does that make me the real entrepreneur, the alternative… or the wanker?

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
Twitter.com/scotmckee

Social Media in B2B Marketing #b2bsm09

The B2B Marketing Magazine seminar on ‘Exploiting Social Media in B2B Marketing’ was quite an eye-opener for me. For a start the Century Club was rammed. Social Media is no longer a fringe subject. It may not be the panacea or indeed pancetta of the B2B world, but nor is it the dirty word(s) of just a few short months ago. I have the impression we’ve successfully managed to flip a very impressive bird at the traditionalists who have been hoping that it would all just go away because they had a pressing lithograph issue to deal with down at the typesetter’s.

So I had a hot ticket, I was dressed up all like my dad with a suit and everything and I waited to be enlightened. And then I wasn’t. Perhaps I already knew more than I was giving myself credit for.

I’m new to the Social Media space. A curmudgeonly old fart, much like myself, is inclined to recoil from the word ‘social’ as Count Dracula might from a tended bowl of Penne Arrabiata and garlic bread. So I’ve avoided it whilst the geeks, propeller-heads and weirdos have filled their boots. But now it’s my turn.

Firstly, there is, so far, little in the way of specialist B2B expertise in the field – decent case studies are still hard to find. The lack of understanding of the B2B sensibilities became apparent at the event when the age-old difference between B2B v B2C was raised as a defining measure of social mediability. In the social media world there is no difference between business and consumer. We are all people. Apparently.

Utter bollocks of course. I’ve spent decades making a passable living from knowing the differences between businesses, consumers, business people acting as consumers and consumer’s behaviours in business. I’m acutely aware that deep down ‘we’re all consumers’ but in the social media space we are absofackinlutely not all the same. I’m still more than a little upset that this regressive step was the entry point to the afternoon’s festivities and the subject stumbled into the post-event discussions on Twitter (#b2bsm09). There was a room packed with well over a hundred people from the B2B marketing fraternity and, whether client or agency, the common denominator was everyone seeking a business model for social media activities. Whether the model was to be experimental or commercial was uncertain, but we were all there as B2B specialists (knowing that we’re different from B2C) to find how to use this relatively new tool. And we were being told we can use these tools in the same way a consumer does. That, in my humble opinion, is less than helpful. The social media model I will be employing will focus on the differences of the business audience and their specific business needs not the commonality. But maybe that’s just me.

We certainly have a new set of weapons in the armoury. Tools. Social media tools. And we haven’t had a new set of clothes on the B2B circuit for as long as I can remember. That’s pretty exciting, right?

We’ve had the web evolution in the last decade which has certainly changed marketing behaviour, but it has, until now, been a comparatively slow evolution, providing little more than online versions of offline thinking. The advent of social media is the evolutionary leap that will hopefully get us all down from the trees. It was mostly agencies patronising this event and I’m not sure if that means the client’s haven’t ‘got it’ yet or if the agencies are trying to keep up – either way, it’s on the agenda. That’s hugely exciting from where I’m sitting. The power has shifted from the corporate propaganda machine to the selective conversations that the customers are prepared to engage with. How’re we going to handle all that then?

I have no idea. Actually, I have several ideas – you can read them on my blog, you can watch the video, you can see the pictures, you can listen to the webcast, you can even shape my thoughts directly on Twitter. The truth, however, is they’re your ideas. Yep, I admit, I’m prepared to listen to what you want. It’s not about me any more, it’s all about you. Damn. Did I just say that? Tell me that’s not exciting? Of course it is. It’s WILD, it’s crazy – and it’s about time. Now pass the Parmigiano, my Arrabiata’s getting cold.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
Twitter.com/scotmckee