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Shoreditch brews up a dis-loyal community
February 08, 2010
Shoreditch’s bustling café society is thought to be the first place to offer customers a disloyalty card in order to drum up business for local independent baristas and reward customers for trying new places in the area.
The loyalty card is a well-established consumer psychology tool but the idea of collecting stamps from eight different coffee houses in order to gain a free coffee was dreamed up by award-winning barista Gwilym Davies to combat the homogenised high street coffee culture.
The reason behind teaming up with fellow independent coffee shops arose due to the overwhelming demand and lengthy queues at Mr Davies' shop on the back of winning the World Barista Championship.
Initially he tried suggesting nearby alternatives that he recommended on a whiteboard, something that might be the last thing a small retailer might want to do in a very competitive and cost-sensitive industry. But as a supportive gesture for fellow traders and to help satiate the increasing lust for good coffee, it still wasn’t enough and so the disloyalty card was born.
Speaking to the Evening Standard, Mr Davies' business partner, Jeremy Challender, said: “There are a lot more places opening, and as prices are the same, it seems a shame a lot of people haven’t experienced high quality coffee. It’s totally different to what you get in a high street chain.”
The partnership has seen eight independent coffee shops join in with the venture which, if successful, could see the consumption of 45,000 coffees and a new culture of using local coffee traders and award winning baristas that are passionate about the content of the cup they vend.
As a retailer, would you try a similar scheme with fellow businesses?
Brand positioning
February 05, 2010
People like to understand what they're buying into, and see if it fits their values and what they're all about. It could be quality, cool, innovation, value, leadership, surprise, luxury, expertise - the list could go on and for any one brand incorporate an appropriate combination of these.
That core brand promise and positioning sits at the heart of everything. We call it brand glue, and it drives many different business decisions and activities including your marketing. It knits everything together and is something that needs careful thought, so it reflects your brand truthfully and as far as possible is different from your competition.
Think BMW aligning behind a premium driving experience, Nike making sportswear for winners and Disney uniting behind a goal to provide happiness and magic. Things wouldn't be quite so effective or memorably unique if they positioned themselves to make expensive cars, colourful footwear and somewhere to take the kids with a good line in mouse hats.
Similarly, confused thinking and lack of clarity can reflect in a confused customer. Imagine if Tesco wanted to state they were the leading supermarket in the country, the best. Let's also add in great service and low prices. Ooo but lets not forget it's an innovative supermarket too for good measure, and the fact that they're pretty keen on the environment. Far easier to remember they want to do everything they can to help you with your shopping down to the tiniest little detail. Everything else is just features.
A well looked after brand will eventually become clearly understood and familiar, as well as something that customers are willing to spend their money on. That’s good brand positioning.
How headlines build credibility
February 03, 2010
You can learn a lot from reviewing old advertisements. Sure, they may not be sophisticated but going back to basics is a good way to gain clarity on your own material.
Waterman’s Fountain Pens advertised as an independent company for nearly 100 years before being taken over by Sandford who still have the brand today.
By taking an overview of the headlines, you can understand how they can support the positioning of your company. Building credibility takes time and this is why it makes sense to consider the long term impact of headlines on your website, brochures, direct mail and advertisements.
By keeping in mind where you want your company to be in three to five years, you can create headlines supporting that desired positioning.
Now, Waterman’s used two types of headlines during their most successful period (1900-1920s). One was just the company’s name. This was acceptable as they were well known and had already been in existence over 25 years then. In today’s climate, this won’t really work unless you have a well known, internationally recognisable brand.
Now what is more important is their use of the short headlines. Here is a selection:
1900s The most important part of your vacation outfit
1910s Simple, Reliable, Durable, Inexpensive and Guaranteed
1910s The tool of opportunity
1910s An expression of intelligent appreciation
1920s Try Waterman’s before you buy
1920s A letter a day while you are away
1920s One of these will fit your perfectly?
In the 1910s, they also used one word headlines such as Speed and Self-Regulating.
The headlines highlighted what the user would experience if they used a Waterman’s Pen or, relating to the aspirations of those using a Waterman’s pen.
This approach is still valid today. By understanding the feelings of your market, you are able to appeal to their aspirations or the fears to grab their attention.
Activity
Dig out all your headlines. Read them in chronological order, what do they say about your business? Is it congruent with how you are positioning in the market place?
By doing this review, you are able to understand what is being received. You are able to change the words, the tone and the feel of the headline to fit with where you want to be in the future.
Remember, by maintaining true to the long game, you are building the future each day with every headline and every piece of material.
This blog post by Karen Purves originally appeared at Have More Clients
Using the block on Twitter
February 02, 2010
Some people do it, some people don’t: what is the right way to use the blocking function on Twitter?
On a Sunday afternoon when I’m mostly investigating the world of online gaming, I just saw a couple of tweets regarding blocking from someone I respect. She says that there’s no point in blocking people who you don’t want to follow, as they can still find ways to read what you are saying, and it is actually harmful in that blocking sends a red flag to twitter about the person.
I’ll deal with the second point first. Simply blocking a person from following you doesn’t raise a flag to Twitter; using the “Block and spam” option does. So if I block you, it won’t have any affect on your Twitter life, apart from not being able to follow me.
I block a lot of people, and I believe I have a strong reason for this activity. I consider my follower list to be the same as an email list: I use Twitter to publicise what I am doing in my business. So I want to have a good number of people in my Twitter following who are going to be receptive (or at least potentially receptive) to the messages I am putting out. I also want my Twitter following to reflect my values; as I consider MLM to be the wrong way to make a living, I don’t want to have a following which includes MLM “practitioners”, as I feel that it would reflect badly on me. So I manage my list; I block people who I don’t want to follow or be associated with.
In some ways, a friend of mine who runs the social media activity for an events and news website has taken this further: he has built up a Twitter following of close to a thousand, all of whom are within a certain distance of his home town. This means that when they use Twitter for a competition in association with a local venue, they know that everyone who sees the tweet directly in their stream will be able to attend the event. These competitions are now a regular part of their activity, and have lead to Twitter being an important part of their operations.
So blocking can be a useful means of managing your account, keeping it tidy, and of increasing it’s value to your business; don’t be worried about blocking people.
In his post “How small newspapers can make money from Twitter” on the Econsultancy blog, Ben LaMothe sets out a strategy for advertising on Twitter that will depend entirely on any newspaper following it using the block to manage their following, though he does not explicitly say this. If activities such as “sponsored tweets” – a polite way of saying advertising in your Twitter stream – take off in a big way, we will see more use of the block to control followings and make them more valuable to the advertiser.
This blog post by Nigel Legg originally appeared on Katugas Social Media Services
Choose brand consistency for 2010
February 01, 2010
The best way to increase profitability through your investment in design and marketing is for you to be consistent. There’s nothing worse for your bottom line than your image chopping and changing. The trouble is the damage from inconsistency is so subtle that many business owners are blissfully unaware of the negative effects on their target audiences. Brand irregularity includes conscious and subconscious confusion, distrust and irritation and can result in customers going elsewhere.
Here are our top five tips for achieving brand consistency:
- Firstly, invest in a quality well designed logo (and if your budget can accommodate it, some simple brand guidelines). This should then form the basis for every piece of marketing material that follows.
- Following on from here ensure your marketing material looks like it belongs to the same family! If there is no clear link between your business card, website and brochure for example, then your customers’ journey is disjointed and your message becomes unclear.
- The biggest and most obvious blunder is to randomly change colours from one piece of marketing communication to the next. Don’t do this! Decide on your brand colours which should be specifically chosen to communicate key messages and then stick to them.
- Select every aspect of your brand carefully. Understand that these brand characteristics all mean something and effect the people that experience your brand. These characteristics should include (but are not limited to) things like fonts, colours, logos, design elements and language style.
- The best way to achieve the above is to establish a long term working relationship with the right designer who can help build that unswerving, dependable and loved brand that will actually have a positive affect on your businesses profitability.
This blog post by Sara Brown originally appeared at sarabrown.co.uk
Branding - let's start with the basics
January 27, 2010
A healthy and strong brand will stand above the competition, standing more chance of being chosen if it's not been tried before as well as having a loyal customer base once it's been purchased.
It all started with cows and making sure you could distinguish your cow from someone else's cow. That led to the most basic form of branding with a unique stamp on your cow's rear end region. With most businesses being a little more complicated than cows nowadays, branding and brand management have had to become more and more sophisticated.
Even now this rather more basic cow example of branding is what people think it's all about - the name and the logo. It's not that simple, and lots of different inputs from all around your business will work together to make up your brand. What is blissfully simple however is the benefit of a well managed, clearly thought through and strong brand. And that is the very catalyst behind the cow example above: being unique, standing out and being identifiable.
That's because a strong healthy brand can:
- Act as a short-cut to what your brand is and how it's different from the competition
- Stand for a central promise - a brand positioning
- Become familiar
This is all fairly critical to us humans, especially when you account for the fact that your average person is exposed to over 5000 messages each day. That's huge. People process information very quickly, and so you have to be at the top of your game to ensure your brand can cut through quickly, be understood, resonate and then become part of a consideration choice. Notice we haven't got to purchased yet!
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