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Rethinking Digital Branding

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By: NMK Created on: March 20th, 2005
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Digital campaigns for Levi's, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Absolut Cut, Virgin Mobile and more were unpacked - and the future of digital branding explored - in this NMK event held on 10 March...

Digital campaigns for Levi’s, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Absolut Cut, Virgin Mobile and more were unpacked - and the future of digital branding explored - in this NMK event held on 10 March...

Report by Deirdre Molloy

Chair: Margaret Manning – CEO, Reading Room

In promotion of this event, NMK flagged up an AOL Henley report which hypothesised that "information obtained online is changing the future and present behaviour of consumers." Introducing proceedings, Margaret Manning explained that AOL/Henley found their hypothesis to be correct – 42% of online consumers have changed their mind about a brand they are going to buy and switched to a different brand. This changing brand preference amounted to a scenario of “brand anarchy” Margaret reckoned.

We need to recognise society has changed forever, she continued, quoting from The Soul Of the New Consumer by David Lewis. "Consumers have certainly evolved from being conformist and deferential children reared on mass production and mass advertising into much freer thinking adults." The internet is having a fundamental influence on they way brands are viewed. Online influences are making customers less loyal, more open to try new brands, more willing to experiment. Why is this happening and what are customers doing? Are customer more able to compare prices? Are some brands better at communicating? Are blogs and other forms of comment giving consumers a stronger voice?

Today, branding is everything. The internet is truly and wholly user driven: it is used at every stage of the purchase process from the initial scan of products, to price comparison, last minute checks, purchase and post-purchase searches and checks for reassurance. So understanding customers can help us force through change, but trust is key - if you’re not trusted, you’re not in the ballpark.

Research shows many of the leading brands are completely missing a trick when it comes to how they're communicating via the internet. Just a little thought and a clear understanding of how the internet works could have a fundamental effect on a brand’s profile. Margaret's key steps to successful branding online in relation to building a successful website were: quality of information, speed of information, functionality, usability, contactability, transparency, brand representation, design and technical performance.

Consumer behaviour on the internet

Margaret marshalled several websites as exemplary in support of her claims. Dabs.com – the UK’s leading retailer of IT and technology products - improved conversion rates and online sales by making site easier to use and focusing on the customer. Neopets.com is consistently voted in the top ten stickiest sites on the web. According to the company, it consistently garners upwards of 1,000 monthly page views per active user and interaction times of more than four hours, leaving all the major portals in its wake. Global membership exceeds 23 million, of which approximately 11 million are active monthly users. Other sites she commended in this context were Race For Life (Cancer Research UK), Priceline.com and weblog services like eBlogger and Blog Business World.

Concluding with an overview of consumer behaviour on the internet, Margaret Manning made the following points about research and purchasing. The internet is a vital part of the research process. The internet is used at every stage of the research process. The purchase process is more considered and more convoluted than offline. Consumers are more informed from a multiplicity of sources; price is not exclusively the primary driver. She added that online information and experience (and modified brand opinions) also translates into offline purchase.

Daniel Letts – Consultant, Wolff Olins

Daniel conjoined the event's subtitle 'Getting To Know You' and the title of NMK’s most recent newsletter – You’ve Gotta Factor For Determined Detractors – as a starting point for his analysis. He argued that the biggest reason why brands online have a lot of difficulty is that for CEOs, the brand is just part of the business, and digital is just one sub-division of that business component.

In light of this he outlined his 'seven deadly sins' of  the brandscape: ignorance, indifference, naivety, zealotry, pride, and avarice (one sin went AWOL). Taking ignorance as self explanatory, he looked at examples of indifference and changes in this area. Owning all the URL variations of your brand, and brand hijacking by detractors were the primary issues here. Hate Orange is still broadcasting its message of ire, while a similar site NTHell has now been bought over by its corporate target and transformed into a help message board styled as ‘the No1 NTL customer voice source’. Its .com version has also been bought up and turned into a link page to NTL’s consumer site. High impact brand interventions like Greenpeace’s Boycott Esso site were important in kickstarting the detractor trend, but a classic example of indifference by the brand owner was the Site Clinic, the .com variation of which brought you to a Korean porn site.

Naivety Daniel characterised as the sin of thinking “we can get away with it” in regards to poor products and lack of transparency. Some people never learn. Just last year someone revealed how you could crack the Kryptonite bike lock with a ballpoint pen – a revelation that spread around the web and cost Kryptonite $10m.

Zealotry Daniel ascribed to the brands who "pull a fast one" in their marketing, whether this involves double-bluffing or supposedly ‘independent’ blogs with several brands having tried out the latter tactic, most of which get exposed by the blogging community.

Pride was illustrated by the Wanadoo staff in France who walked out over their employers VOIP service because it barely passed muster. Similarly a discussion board on BBC Radio 5 Live was convulsed by a drift into foul language. The entire discussion community upped sticks and continued their discussion on another message board, a classic example of web squatting.

Why all this matters is down to the power of recommendation. Whether you can grow your recommenders over your detractors, and the propensity to recommend, is completely dependent on the quality of service. Consumers care more about brands online, Daniel asserted and he agreed with Margaret Manning that it’s not just a price-driven world. In terms of positively viewed brands the BBC do well. eBay’s reputation system builds their brand and Google has further boosted its brand with its desktop search and Gmail service. Amazon has benefited from its recommendations and OneClick tool while the recent success of Apple’s iPod has seen the new product grow to represent 50% of Apple’s turnover, and increased the sales of Macs in the process.

All these brands have worked hard to do stuff that is meaningful to us as consumers, Daniel concluded. The majority of them haven't spent much money on advertising. Instead they put the money into product research and development. So Daniel’s talk stressed that meaning and added value were the touchstones of brand strength – and the best antidote to detractors – in the digital age.

Richard Crab – Design Director, Start Creative
Case Study: Virgin Mobile

Start Creative deliver brand and digital solutions and Richard’s talk focused on their relationship with client Virgin. They operate at a strategic managerial level with Virgin as well as working with the brand divisions. Richard identified the 'brand gap' as an integral issue for any business, as the word 'brand' itself has a brand problem. But, he continued, it's too simplistic to blame media for product failures.

Discussing how powerful brands contribute to market value, he used the example of when Mannesman bought Orange and kept the acquired brand intact. On the question of how you create a brand Richard quoted Einstein "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Knowledge tells you where you’ve been, imagination tells you where you want to go. [Einstein himself continued: "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world".]

Virgin’s brand has long been associated with standing up for the consumer against monopoly giants and rip-off services. They produce a brand book which is a collection of Virgin culture over the years. Such is their reputation that they're more trusted than the Bank Of England and 73% of consumers polled say a bad experience won't detract from what they think of the Virgin brand. The link to the real person in the form of Richard Branson humanises the brand in tandem with its philosophy of people first. The colour red has also served them well over the years.

But there’s no standing still or resting on laurels, he explained. Keeping an eye on culture counts, such as the modern student culture which chooses Gervais over Guevara (illustrated in a Gervais-as-Che poster). But identity is about more than a good logo, a truth embodied by the artist Banksy – he’s more about what he's saying, not about the stencil approach. Former ITV director Jim Hyntner said: “You can intellectualise brands out of your bottom. I just want our new look to make people feel better,” relying on the logo again. Adbusters' parodies of logos debunked this ages ago. But whether you're pro-logo or no logo, how can you argue against Evian supporting the Lido in the face of closure? Rankin said: "Say something, stand for something, but keep it unmediated."

Richard believes it’s essential that brands have stories, like The Streets when he was launched into the music market. A Chomsky reading activist, on the other hand, might be more tickled by the intellectual jokes of The Economists’ adverts. Authenticity is a great boon. Reebok borrow equity and cool, whereas Boxfresh’s recent ads show you real youth in the 1970’s. They use that equity but don’t try to borrow it.

Affinity is another strength. By being real you create a real affinity. Mobile phones express so much about their owner's personality (Nokia are predicting 70million 3G phones in use by then end of 2005), so brands in mobile space have scope to build very personal affinities. Other clear affinities are found in the Co-op brand’s corporate social responsibility, Calmia’s transformational ethics ("everything you need for holistic lifestyle"), and Radio 4’s emphasis on discussion and thinking.

Finally Richard emphasised trust as a core brand strength, citing Virgin Mobile's tagline of 'Pick me up, turn me on, use me to your heart's content.' Their brand is about access and at the launch of retail there was no con and no contract. Virgin Mobile’s proposition was all about communicating and not about technology. To prove just how accessible it is, the customer catalogue gives you all you ned to know about the service. Working with Virgin, Start Creative created a bespoke retail identity that wasn’t about the corporate manual but about how you flex, as per the localisation of outlets led by the location-specific signage and interactive interior for the basement store below Virgin's music store (formerly Tower Records) in Picadilly Circus.

When they were considering added value Start Creative looked at services like Vodaphone Live, MTV and Sky. They looked at other things filling the moments of boredom. They ended up going for pure, bite-sized entertainment on their mobile phone portal (created by Que Pasa) making "honest sense" out of the WAP technology. And they’ve engaged with new channels through the Sky red button where 450,000 people spent over 5 minutes in their branded environment without buying anything – the meaning and affinity generated through this added value experience being an end in itself.

Chris Clarke - Creative Director, Wheel
Case Study: ABSOLUT Cut

Launching Cut in the UK, Wheel defined the need for a "grown up" RTD (ready to drink) and were excited over what ABSOLUT could add to the category. Chris Clarke noted the cynicism over current RTD brands and some of undesirable associations they had picked up.

Discussing the ABSOLUT brand, he said it's never been about being the first to do something and it doesn't go in for borrowed equity (ie. sponsoring events or jumping on bandwagons). Instead, ABSOLUT have worked closely with artists developing content around the brand and so developing cultural capital. Wheel settled on the core project of 'updating an icon' because the new bottle still feels homemade and tactile, and it's an alcopop for adults, for people with more evolved tastes. An evolution of the motherbrand positioning of "inspiring creative connections" was required. Hence the strategy of no ATL communications; but a quiet launch to culturally aware urbanites in their mid-twenties, through web, PR and launch parties.

Partnership with Kultureflash

The web was the hub of the campaign, providing a platform for a buzz campaign and a way of rolling out a tease, reveal, dialogue strategy. They chose Kultureflash e-mail newsletter magazine (read by 20,000 people largely within the creative industries) as their partner. The campaign evolved, providing an exclusive inside track on this new ABSOLUT phenomenon. The campaign idea integrated the brand with the audience’s interests, combining online with launch event and post event feedback.

At first, some installation artworks were positioned in venues around London (such as 33 Monmouth St) that weren’t immediately accessible. Then these artworks, or a suggestion to 'look somewhere in particular' began to be alluded to and mentioned in articles in KultureFlash. Eventually in later newsletters, ads appeared in the newsletter, apparently linking to other websites that were in fact just anagrams for ABSOLUT Cut: Tulsa Tub Co, About Cults, Out At Clubs and A Locust Tub, and the URLs of which were actually staging posts to the main ABSOLUT site.

Photos of their launch parties were posted online and dialogue started through party feedback. The results were good: there were 21,000 visitors during Kultureflash month and a high average "time with brand" spent. As a piece of highly targeted communications it was judged a huge success. The web was the hub of the campaign and provided the brand with a platform for going mainstream next year.

Craig Hill – Managing Director, Digital Outlook
Case study: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy THE MOVIE

Craig started with a poll of the audience, finding that the majority has read at least one Douglas Adams book. He explained that Digital Outlook had delivered traditional film campaigns using established approaches, such as the King Arthur media campaign on MSN, but they still felt there were new approaches that could be explored.

The first Hitchhiker's teaser trailer was released in November 2004 and was part of a new approach.  This involved working with the books' genuine fans, sharing behind the scenes information on the film exlusively; a new approach for film companies, made possible by the close involvement of the distributor, Buena Vista and the film's executive producer, Robbie Stamp.  The dialogue with the fans has been maintained throughout the film marketing campaign, including a number of events and exclusive releases.  Ain't It Cool News plugged it in their Butt numb-a-thon, and Alan Rickman and Bill Bailey were named in a casting exclusive. In January 2005 they focused on filmmakers: a Nick and Garth Q&A and a Stephen Fry casting exclusive.

Responses to the teaser trailer were also positive and this precipitated a rapid spread to mainstream film sites worldwide.

What Craig has taken from this is the value of working with the real fans of recognised properties, marking a genuine step forward complementing other mainstream online marketing techniques.

Dan Bambach - Lateral
Case Study: Levi's ® Europe

Dan gave some background on Lateral's work as the digital agency of Levi's® Europe. They work Europe-wide and on a local level with Levi’s ® Europe offices in 7 locations. The Levi's ® Europe website was re-launched in 2003 with an initial brief to regain control of digital through innovation, address 15-24 year old guys and girls, concentrate on creating a novel brand experience, and provide effective digital experiences and toys, all with ATL campaign support. This approached served them well resulting in a 50:50 gender balance, age range on target and purchase intent increased.

Levi's ® Europe is moving off-site and going multi-channel in order to provide richer interactions, Dan explained, ways for people to create and contribute as well as consume, word-of-mouth experiences, and developing properties with a longer life-span. Lateral and Levi’s ® Europe are just embarking on this approach, with LDAA (Levi's Digital Arts Awards, a platform for European-wide content contributed from young people to be judged by their peers), Girls Only, and their mobile application, MAX.

How does mobile fit into this picture, asked Dan. It's not presentationally or interactively very advanced, it's not suited to casual browsing. It's not easy to transfer people to other/ richer channels via mobile. In short, mobile is not great for 'brand experiences'. But in other respects the fit is good. It's well suited as response/ recruitment mechanism, and it's a very personal channel. Mobile can pick up on peoples 'down-time', and the advent of 3G is driving awareness. Crucially, people accept and expect to interact with brands through this channel.

In terms of operating in this context, Dan said there's no harm in using direct response SMS, but you shouldn’t just jump in and create a gimmick. The offering has to be relevant to the channel. You need to justify to the consumer the cost of getting involved. And you need to make it broad/ cross-channel. He addressed their creation of the MAX application with these factors in mind.

Based on a Java Application, the MAX app works on a range of handsets. Lateral designed it and hired another company to build it. It allows users to compose tunes and upload to eu.levi.com, download others' tunes and remix them, and allows visitors to listen to and use compositions as ring tones with the option of rating peers' compositions. Dan considered this a model property insofar as people can interact with it to different degrees and in different channels. Visitors generate content for eu.levi.com and people can take content away with them. Those that use the application spend time interacting positively with the brand in the mobile channel. Development of the MAX application after launch will be ongoing.

The eu.levi.com website was also adapted for WAP. Its WAP edition was made to support 'Midsummer' - a heavy push for Levi’s. It offered a preview of the new advert before any other channel and they used SMS from eu.levi.com to aid the jump. It was used mainly to drive Max take-up.

Levi’s ® Europe began to extend the brand through the MAX Competition. This is the first use of the MAX property and, inverting the ring-tone industry model, will take a tune composed using MAX, re-mix it and cut it to vinyl. Industry pros have come on board as judges, and Lateral see it as a novel way of digital breaking back into 'analogue' channels.

About the Speakers:

Margaret Manning - CEO, Reading Room
In 1996 Margaret jointly founded Reading Room, now one of the UK's top five independent award winning digital communications company with 2 UK locations and Sydney office. Margaret is also lead project director for many of Reading Room's larger project for clinets such as The Disability Rights Commission, British Library, The Law Society and The Energy Saving Trust. A keynote speaker, presenting for amongst others, the Institute of Directors, Professional Services Marketing Group, IIR, QDOS, New Media Group, The Law Society and The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, she is also the Internet editor of FD Centre magazine, and is one of the regular team of experts commenting in Internet Magazine. Prior to joining Reading Room Limited she was a senior manager at 3i plc involved in business process re-engineering.

Daniel Letts - Consultant, Wolff Olins
Daniel Letts is a consultant at leading branding agency Wolff Olins with more than 10 years’ experience in interactive media. He has worked on a number of high profile projects for clients such as Abbey, AOL, BBC, BBVA, BT, Go, Hutchison 3G, Indesit, Reuters, and Unilever. Daniel began his career as a documentary and film producer, is a trained architect, and studied computing at postgraduate level with Middlesex University. He has also lectured in 'Online Branding' at New Media Knowledge, and the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. Currently, he's looking at ways in which government and commercial service delivery can learn from the online experience.
 
Richard Crabb - Design Director, Start Creative
Richard has many years experience in design and brand management in B2B and consumer goods and services on both the client and agency side. Working as Design Manager for Virgin Atlantic he managed global development of the brand culminating in a very successful corporate identity rebrand and livery programme. Operating in a similar capacity as Brand Manager for UK telecoms brand Orange he delivered award winning brand development and management tools across the UK business. He is currently heading up the Design Team at UK top ten independent agency Start Creative. The agency have picked up numerous industry awards and accolades for design and branding across a mix of clients including: Royal Mail, Hertz, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, and the BBC.

Chris Clarke - Creative Director, Wheel
Chris Clarke has worked in the online advertising industry since 1999. Chris is a writer and the Executive Creative Director of full-service digital agency Wheel where he continues to do creative work for among others, ABSOLUT, BT, Opodo, Starbucks and Inbev. Prior to joining Wheel Chris was one of the founding members in the UK of pioneering online advertising agency Abel & Baker.

Craig Hill - Managing Director, Digital Outlook
Craig has 20 years of experience in marketing, IT and multimedia, starting his full-time career explaining what that funny ‘mouse thing’ was dangling from the keyboard of Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. For the last 10 years he has specialised in the introduction of new multimedia technologies in media, playing an active role in the introduction of PC-based Digital Video technologies in the early 90s, and establishing Foresight New Media as one of the pioneering UK New media agencies in 1995. Over an 8 year period, Foresight developed in a number of new market areas, including a multidiscipline online and offline marketing agency, opening international offices, own product development and interactive TV, all through organic growth and joint ventures. Craig is now Managing Director for Digital Outlook.

Dan Bambach - Producer, Lateral
 Dan joined Lateral in 2003 to manage and produce their Levi's Europe account, handling the development of the award-winning www.eu.levi.com and a range of other campaigns. Upon leaving university in 1994, Dan joined the Cyberia/Easy Net group working across training courses and press relations and then left in 1995 to co-found the press agency Virtual Publishing House. In late '96 he went freelance developing web marketing products for UIP, Virgin Books and V2 music who he eventually joined. In March 2002 Dan joined Eidos/Eidoscope as Product Manager responsible for the development of a multiplayer chat environment for customers including ITV-F1 and ITV-Football.

See the Event outline


Comments

s_mckenzie said:

Campaigns incorporating established fashion & music PR tactics <p>Very interesting to see the influence of fashion and music PR tactics on the positioning strategy of digital campaigns, especially the campaign for ABSOLUT Cut. Getting a buzz going about a product aimed at the affluent, trendsetting twentysomethings ABSOLUT are targeting has long involved creating exlusive or 'limited-edition' cultural capital around the brand or product, whether that's a music festival, a new range of jewelery, or a designer diffusion line giving a younger face to an aging fashion label. <br/>But what else is digital bringing to the equation here apart from its generic 'useful and measurable interface' to recuit and involve the early adopters/evangelists. Is this an evolution, or merely digital borrowing from another branch of the marketing spectrum?<br/></p>

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