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

Mobile Parking

I am deeply, deeply cross about the car parking charges at my local train station. There isn’t a bus I can take to the station, I can’t be dropped off every day and I have no friends. I have to drive to the station. And park. They put up the price of parking every year – I can’t understand why, it’s hardly a high maintenance facility. I’m so cross about the parking that, despite the operator’s attempts to make me pay for parking using a mobile phone, I have resolutely refused. I want them to have the inconvenience of counting the coins that I so religiously pump into the machine every day. It’s not easy, let me tell you. I stagger around most of the week, bow-legged under the weight of silver coinage collected to feed the ‘No Change Given’ monster. It ruins my svelte trouser line.

The other day, however, I was caught short. Being able to muster only £4.50 of the requisite £5.50, I was forced to concede and call the parking hotline. Imagine my surprise when I completed the entire registration and parking transaction in less than two minutes – entirely without defaulting to ‘operator assistance’. RingGo has the best voice recognition system and user experience I have ever encountered on a phone. I was so impressed, I did it again a few days later from a different station and I audibly squeaked with excitement when the automated voice recognised me, my car and my new location using geo-positioning on my mobile. I simply confirmed and was on my way, barely breaking stride.

I assumed that every mobile transaction would be as simple – or at least when I parked my car. Oh no. Why on earth would life be that simple? Having been lured into mobile voice transactions, I returned to my normal car park and decided I should embrace the change that mobile transactions could enable. But this was a different system. It didn’t have voice recognition, it wasn’t a seamless, intuitive process and it didn’t work. It wasn’t RingGo. I had to punch out every letter of my number plate, and my credit card, and my address. The menu system was appalling and just as I neared the end of the registration torture I was kicked out of the system. 12 times. Oh, how I laughed…

If there had been a mobile internet application, the whole transaction could have been so much easier. With a quick click and a couple of swipes the job would have been done. But of course, mobile internet ‘app culture’ has just arrived, or, more accurately, is just arriving. Which means there’s an opportunity, and a danger, for brands engaging in the mobile space.

The opportunity is to get it right. I didn’t just buy a ticket the first time I used my phone to pay for parking, I bought a mobile experience. It was one that worked initially, and then I discovered I had to be selective about the brands that I trusted for mobile engagement. If it says RingGo on the parking sign, I can trust it. RingGo is good, their competitors are shit. Had I tried the crap system first, I would have stuck to coins. The same is true of any other mobile experience. It will be important to make sure that the online brand experience we have created for our audiences actually works on mobile.

How, for example, does your glorious new corporate website perform and engage your audience on a three inch mobile phone screen? Mmmm. That part’s easily fixed, but beyond WAP enablement and iPhone apps, there’s a world of mobile that everyone’s using, except the B2B marketing community. As we increasingly migrate our business communications to mobile devices, it’s going to be important to distinguish between the brands that can migrate seamlessly, and those left standing around in the car park jiggling the loose change in their pockets. Let’s hope it’s loose change at least.

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

Mobile – It’s the new black

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about my new iPhone. It is a thing of beauty that I, quite literally, take to bed with me and, more than once, have found myself licking with affection. When I finally converted from my totally unusable Sony Ericsson, I was accused of simply being a sheep and following the herd, but I care not a jot, I’m in love. The best part of course, is that I don’t have the slightest inkling how to use the damn thing and am only just starting to discover the possibilities. Which are endless.

My wife has already banned me from holding it when I’m talking to her because, apparently, I’m more interested in the content on my phone. She actually hides it when we have visitors to the house because, “Sitting on the sofa with your phone and grunting occasionally does not count as joining the conversation…” Of course, I am actually fully engaged in the conversation, just not hers.

So, whilst clearly not first to the bar at the SmartPhone party, I find myself fully committed to the future of mobile internet delivery. It’s an area of the marketing mix that has been woefully underexploited in the business community, but it’s OK, you can relax, I’m going to fix that.

Having started to explore the opportunity, it came as no real surprise that users’ appetite for mobile content is far more advanced than brands’ understanding of the technology and capabilities, or limitations. Despite the Credit Crunch, over 40 million G3 Smartphone devices had been sold worldwide at the end of 2008 with some of the top manufacturers still posting sales growth of over 80% pa. Whilst the recession may be hurting large parts of the global economy, the mobile market is growing – at speed.

And yet businesses have failed to capitalise on the ability to deliver their digital content to this rapidly growing mobile audience in anything like a compelling way. If I want to access a website from my phone (and I do, all the time…) I can do it, but the experience sucks. On a 3×2” screen, I really don’t care about your flash animations and your searchable, keyword heavy content that appears in 0.05 point type with fifteen dropdown navigation tabs that I can’t read. I couldn’t be arsed to pinch and slide and zoom and scroll – I want and need better delivery of your content on my mobile device if I’m going to engage with your brand. And I’m not the only one. There are 39.99m others who would like a better experience too.

In the next couple of years, I predict an explosion in the development of website content for mobiles. It started with, “There’s an app for that…” where iPhone users could enjoy bespoke applications, easily accessed, with simple, intuitive functionality, but fell short when links from the app led straight back to standard web page content on the main brand website. That needs to change. We need to differentiate between static delivery of web content (large format screens), and mobile devices (SmartPhones, NetBooks, PDAs). The difference is obviously the size, but also the needs of the audience using the device and the environment in which they are using them. Speed, clarity and simplicity of content will reward the brands who move boldly into this space with the customer attention that they need to secure.

Options at the moment, however, are limited. But that’s the opportunity. Brands can use their own IT department to deliver mobile internet (the BBC has made a good job of it) but it takes time, costs are high and it may not work across all mobile platforms. Or they can tap into the expertise of others – Mobestar is my favourite. Mobestar’s mLite suite is, “…the first packaged product to automate mobile website production.” I liked it so much, I joined the company. Far from being a sheep and following the herd then, I believe I’m actually leading the pack. So flock ewe.

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