Strategy in a digital world

Joanna Bakas & Stefan Erschwendner Managing Partner of Lighthouse CEE

Strategy in a digital worldHow to lead a brand in 2010

HOW TO LEAD A BRAND IN 2010

A holistic view of brand, media & consumer

Markets are conversations

Several shifts in marketing happened of the the last years:• Decreasing relevance of advertising• General shift towards digital• Fragmentation of markets• Network effects among consumers• Rising consumer expectations

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88133570@N00/2980385784/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88133570@N00/2980385784/

Digital – the first, the last, the everything

As “digital primacy” has risen, so has the way consumers learn about and purchase a brand’s products and services.

Because of the interactive nature of the medium, one brand experience can lead a consumer from “awareness” through “purchase” and “recommendation” almost instantly.

According to a Razorfish study, 64% of consumers have made a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience such as a website, microsite, mobile coupon, or email.

No other medium has so impacted—or altered—the traditional marketing funnel this way.

2009 Razorfish digital brand experience study

Blank – The power of blank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPICpydTH6Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPICpydTH6Q

How to lead a brand in 2010

5 directions in which brands need to improve their efforts to ensure current and future growth:

•365•Optimize media & networks•Content is crucial•Conversations are essential•Strategy needs to lead digital

365The shift from campaigns to conversations

The shift from campaigns to conversations

“The conversation is going on whether you care to be involved or not. If you choose not to be involved, you lose control of the conversation about your product, your service, your brand, your organisation – you become irrelevant.”

Cluetrain manifesto

2009 Razorfish FEED


In the past – Brands were not building sustainable relationships

Traditional Campaigns start from almost zero and abandon the audience they’ve amassed upon completion. Marketing has gone away from away from cyclic campaign boost in favour of active and suistanable relationships. Marketing cannot interrupt a dialog with consumers along time. Today, communication is fragmented, surgical and constant.

Campaigns need to be based on earning Sustainable Relationships and leverage the existing audience for future growth.

http://www.slideshare.net/maximo23/do-you-still-know-anything-about-marketing



To do’s for brands:

• Identify digital brand communities, especially on a local level

• Use social media monitoring to gain insights and a feeling for the community – identify opinion leaders and topics

• Shift budgets from traditional channels to establish a strategy that includes digital & social media as an integrated part

• Review internal structures (cross department teams) to ensure dialog capacities

• Set clear goals for activities and track key performance indicators like fans, mentions, interactions, activations, direct sales, buzz,…

• Start with little steps and adapt plans according to internal/external feedback and KPI tracking

OPTIMIZE MEDIA & NETWORKS

Create synergies between owned, paid & earned media

Optimize media & networks

“We are not in the business of supporting media companies. We are in the business of connecting consumers.”

Trevor Edwards, VP Global Brand, Nike

Companies spend most of their marketing budget on media instead of content. In times of digital extensions and social networks – everybody becomes a media owner and is able to reach masses.

This means for brands that everything between the brand and the consumer will get stream lined. If content can flow freely and is pushed by brand communities there is a smaller need for paid media. However you still need paid media to push messages, because people can’t want what they don’t know.


The more owned media the less paid media is neededBrands start to shift budgets from paid media to owned media. Pepsi is shifting it’s $ 20 million from superbowl to social.

Owned media platforms need to be socialWithin the field of owned media there is a shift to platforms that offer a setup to earned media. Brands start following the audience.

With 2010 Coke and Unilever shift from microsite (owned) to social media (partly owned but high ratio of earned media).

* http://www.nma.co.uk/news/cover-story-coke-drops-campaign-sites-in-favour-of-social-media/3008538.article

http://www.nma.co.uk/news/cover-story-coke-drops-campaign-sites-in-favour-of-social-media/3008538.article

Brands need to create content first to earn media

When brands produce content that is worth discussing and sharing, this well spent money directly converts into „earned“ media.

Interruption media Interaction media



Successful examples of earned media

In the digital age brands are not dependend on their media spendings as they used to be. Figure out what is useful in your particular case and the (brand) community will do the rest for you.



Successful examples of earned media

• iPad 19.900.000 hits on Google

• More than 100.000 fans on Facebook

• Up to 2400 tweets per minute• Free media coverage across

the globe in various traditional main stream channels

VW – GTI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV_t29sX8-Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV_t29sX8-Y

The home of the brand is everywhere

In an age of high media fragmentation, growing importance of media and the ability to use liquid content across multiple channel the home of the brand is not the website anymore.

Brands need to follow the people and be were the people are instead of trying to drive people to their homes with the help of expensive campaigns.

The home of the brand is libero.com, google.com, facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com, flickr.com, formspring.com, vimeo.com…

Contemporary websites need to pull content from social media portals and become a central hub that guides users depending on their needs.

Source: Aberdeen Group – The ROI on Social Media Monitoring (October 2009)



• Integrate brand communities and platform in all brand activities

• Try to leverage owned media for every brand activity

• Shift owned media channels in favor for owned media with strong social integration or improve social integration of existing owned media eg. Facebook connect & I like buttion – the whole internet is a social network

• Constantly update and review social networks to look for additional synergies for brand activates


Specifically

Many brands misunderstand the nature of each medium and consider integration as the replication of the brand story across all channels – e.g. using social media to showcase ATL communication content

Today, the stories are not about integration but about TRANSMEDIA story telling..

The term basically refers to a narrative that occurs across many media forms, each of which contribute significantly to how the viewer perceives and processes the narrative.


Specifically taking a bottom up approach to (transmedia) story telling

Most campaigns have tended towards a ‘top-down' approach. This means that the existing creative and campaign elements are broken down into sub-categories according to their potential for use in social media. In other words, they started with the traditional advertising that they already had, and tried to fit aspects of it into online media.

Taking a bottom-up approach would require us to start with the media forms that they want to incorporate, and build the campaign upwards from these. This means that potential Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube are written into the campaign as it evolves, greatly maximising its impact across the media once it has launched.

old way integration

Outdoor Print

copy/paste existing content and messages without paying attention to the specific context and user behavior within channels

new way: transmedia storytelling

the brand narrative or the brand story

Connection and sharing

Instant updates

Surprise and entertain

Visual story telling

Detail

Awareness

Utilize the power of each specific channel so that users can experience messages and content that are tailored to their current environment

step 1: define your story

Frank Striefler: How to create advocacy and conversations, http://www.slideshare.net/strieflerf/planningness-conference-draft1

step 2: share your story

Connection and sharing

Instant updates

Surprise and entertainVisual story telling

Detail

Awareness

the brand narrative or the brand story

Some transmedia examples

http://mumbrella.com.au/birds-v-humans-in-ambitious-tooheys-5-seeds-cider-launch-10318

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs - IN TVhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO4b2ZeVEaM&feature=channel - on YOUTUBE

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/business/media/17salt.html?ref=technology

Nike – Write the story

http://wklondon.typepad.com/welcome_to_optimism/









CONTENT IS CRUCIALBrands need to produce content to stay top of search & share

Digital shift perceptions

• In a digital world brand action/experience/content counts more than a brand message.• Consumers google for brands, look at product reviews and check out branded Twitter and Facebook profiles. What they find online is what counts• 65% of consumers have changed their brand perception positive or negative depending on the digital brand experience.• You can further build your brand in the digital world and leverage or compliment overall brand experience

2009 Razorfish digital brand experience study

Digital experience & interaction

Digital experience influences consumers

• 65% report a digital experience changing their brand perception

• 97% report that digital experience has influenced their purchase

• 24% have produced digital content in order to enter a contest

2009 Razorfish FEED, http://feed.razorfish.com/

Burger King – Whopper Sacrifice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXd0UoxK-Ik&feature=related

Content is crucial


• Brands need to led lose of their brand control and give power to consumers. They will use your content, modify your content and share your content with no respect for copyrights or ownership.

• Review current legal status of brand content and adjust buy out right for all upcoming brand content.

• Review existing brand content that can be adopted for conversations to earn media.

• Rethink the way how you present your products/services in a digital world. People read less copy and love to watch videos.

• Make it possible for consumers to engage with your own content and give them possibilities build up on your framework.

CONVERSATIONS ARE ESSENTIAL

Digital can trigger conversations online & offline

Rethink how you used to look at media

• Marketeers look at media as something passive, something you viewed, something that you consume in a lean back mode.• Passive consumption leads to thinking of creativity as a product - something sealed, perfect final, sent into the world• Digital works different than all other forms of media. Digital allows a real time dialog commmunication.• Digital can serve as a medium that you consume in a lean back mode like TV and in the same it allow active participation, conversation and exchange.

http://feed.razorfish.com/

A new generation of consumers as entered the market

• Digital natives (people born after 1980) have grown up consuming media actively. Itʼs a different mode of consumption.• People are used to look for all kind of information online, raise questions and look for recommendation. They like to consume content when they want (YouTube) and share what they find useful.

Active idea consumption requires a corresponding shift in how brands think about creativityFrom product to process (with gaps in it, that people can fit into)The focus shifts from what brands say to what brands do

Square - Demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSzsFAJAKHI

Pull people together and give them something to do

„The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do... I don‘t have to control the conversation to benefit from their interest"

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

2009 Razorfish FEED

Conversation & interaction pays back on many levels

• Consumer insightsBest in class organisations are 2.6 times more likely than industry average companies, and 93 times more likely than laggards, to improve their ability to generate consumer insights that drive new product / service development.

• Brand reputationBest in class organisations are 3.3 times more likely than industry average companies, and 82 times more likely than laggards, to improve their ability to identify and reduce risk to the brand.

• Customer advocacyBest in class organisations are 2.3 times more likely than industry average companies, and 19 times more likely than laggards, to improve customer advocacy.

• Customer serviceBest in class organisations are 2.8 times more likely than industry average companies, and 15 times more likely than laggards, to decrease customer service costs.

Source: Aberdeen Group – The ROI on Social Media Monitoring (October 2009)

Conversations are essential


• Make it possible for users to interact with your brand via their preferred channel.

• Use Twitter for breaking news and instant help, create communities of social sites like Facebook, inform the audience more detailed via a blog, host videos and ads on YouTube, share your picture bank via Flickr or let users ask questions via formspring.

• Use brand communities as a hugh trial, research & development area. Consumer co-creation. Involve brand lovers in marketing and product development. Allow users to interacte and engage with the brand.

• Constantly feed in exclusive information and discount offers into your community of brand lovers. So that they can share brand news and evangelize new user.

STRATEGY TODAYStrategy needs to pay more attention to digital

Strategy today

There is no future for digital strategy, but there will always be future for strategy in a world going digital.

Digital is not something seperate anymore. Digital is part of everyday. As a marketeer you need to look at the world holisticly and not as seperate silos.

In the short term digital needs to be become an integrated part of everything the brand does, this means especially to go beyond advertising.

In the long term digital needs to become the central stream of how the whole organization works.

2009 Razorfish FEEDhttp://feed.razorfish.com/

Strategy today

transfer best performing content into other kinds of offline media like TV & print

From big ideas to micro strategies

transfer best performing content into other kinds of offline media like TV & print

http://www.slideshare.net/Klawiklawaklawong/digital-strategy-a-deck-for-the-university-of-applied-sciences-siegen-3216472

Why digital will be the key asset for brands

• Consumers won’t look for products & services anymore, they will find consumers via social networks– Influence of word-of-mouth is growing (An average Facebook user has

130 friends), while trust in advertising is on an all time low.

• Brands need to develop more consumer relevant content to keep relationships and stay top of mind– Brands need to open up, share content and join conversations to use

social network effects and optimize owned and earned media

• Digital will be the main content platform where all brand related content is available, all other forms of media will carry “teasers”– Digital is the only media where brands can share their full content. In the

future this content needs to adapt to different channel to create convenience for consumers and utilize the benefits of each medium

Predictions for 2010

• Less will get done, until we find out how to do more with less• Brands will rush to employ “social media/digital strategies”• Marketing will have more data and less understanding• Great content will travel at “speed of share”• Push versus pull will become less relevant• The target group 18-49 will become even less coherent• Size will become less relevant

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About Lighthouse

we believe that business opportunities come from an insight into the bigger

picture and understanding consumers as people from a cultural and sociological

perspective

In short we are a a brand and business consultancy with offices in Copenhagen focusing on the Nordics and in Vienna where we focus on Central Eastern Europe.

Our guiding principle is that as a brand and business consultancy, we believe that good strategies come from an overall understanding on society and people.

We measure changing consumer behavior and evolving needs. This helps us better understand the business opportunities – WHITE SPACES.

Based on identifying unmet needs and business opportunities, together with our clients we create and implement powerful business and brand ideas that create value.

CONTEXT measurement(strategy and opportunity spaces)

Ideas that people are ready to embrace

idea CREATION(content)

Powerful concepts inspired

by context opportunities

consumer CONNECTION(implementation follow through)

Getting it out there to market

What we do: Our model – Culture Tap

Contact

Joanna BakasManaging [email protected]+36 70 568 4849

Stefan ErschwendnerManaging [email protected] + 43 650 372 6486

Lighthouse CEERasumofskygasse 261030 WienAustria

Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/LH_CEE

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