Archive for the 'Brand/Product Advocacy' Category
Avid readers of this blog probably know that Weber Shandwick is not only obsessed with advocacy but also with corporate reputation. As part of the Reputation Research team, I was thrilled to see the results of the Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient (RQ) survey proclaiming that a “strong statistical correlation exists between a company’s overall reputation and the likelihood that consumers will purchase, recommend or invest in a company or its products and services.” In other words, companies that attend to their reputations are rewarded with advocacy. Of course, we’ve known this for a long time (check out our Return on Advocacy white paper) but it’s really gratifying to see esteemed third party substantiation! Don’t miss Leslie Gaines-Ross’ blog, reputationXchange, and Weber Shandwick’s web site, reputationRx, to learn all about reputation.
Miller Brewing has its own fulltime employee blogging about the beer industry and its arch rival Anheuser-Busch. This is an unusual advocacy platform. Being an advocate for your own company and badvocating or breaking news about your competitor breaks several traditional and social media conventions and can certainly be described as “out of the box” thinking.
Jim Arndorfer’s blog is called BrewBlog and I first read about it in the WSJ. The blog has practically developed into its own news feed and has a fair amount of influence in the beer sector. The Journal article described how Arndorfer scooped the trade publications on a new ale being produced by A-B called Budweiser American Ale. As described, “Brew Blog is the latest and perhaps most unlikely front in Miller’s drive to rattle Anheuser.”
To make it all fair in love and war, Arndorfer also posts negative tales about his own company although my sense is that they are less problematic than the ones about A-B.
Wisely, Arndorfer makes no attempt to hide who his employer is. The blog makes it evidently clear that he is a Miller employee. Transparency rules.
Advocates and badvocates come from everywhere but this one is unusual at best. I had to read the article twice to understand how this actually worked. Gathering information on your rival to be published on a company blog is not business as usual. Something to watch over time.
The blog is particulary interesting to read as talks between InBev and A-B heat up.
At Weber Shandwick, we’ve been warning companies about badvocacy as long as we’ve been encouraging them to tap into the power of advocacy. Badvocacy is simply the act of criticizing companies, brands or products and it’s becoming rampant as social media accelerates (as my mother recently gleefully declared after dealing with a customer service injustice, “You don’t even need to picket the store anymore, you just go on the Internet!”). Highlighting this trend, the Society for New Communications Research recently released the results of a survey sponsored by Nuance Communications that shows that 59 percent of active Internet users use social media to vent about a customer care experience. That’s a lot of venting.
Lest companies make the mistake of shrugging off online critics or dismissing social media as a valid communications channel, the study also finds that the majority of online consumers are using the Internet to research companies’ customer care reputations before making the purchase (72 percent) and choose companies or brands based on others’ experiences they read about online (74 percent). Most consumers (81 percent) believe that blogs, discussion forums and online ratings systems give consumers a greater voice (our own research supports this newfound sense of empowerment: more than half of online respondents say they have more power to influence company success or failure today than ever before).
So even if customers aren’t writing about negative experiences, they’re reading about, and heeding, the experiences of others. Companies can’t hide from badvocacy – they need to recognize that the function of customer service has been forever changed. They need to respond to situations in new and inventive ways that minimize the risk of an unhappy customer escalating his or her problems to the world.
Looking forward to the full report from SNCR and Nuance due out later this year.
I was in a meeting on the West coast this week. The topic was advocacy (why are you not surprised?). When the question was posed.
OK, not exactly in the way this blog post’s title suggests. And, no, there was no rousing Cole Porter-styled big-band score you’d expect to go with it. Or any fancy footwork a la Fred Astaire. Just the bland illumination of ubiquitious PowerPoint. And a spilled cup of H20.
The question was pretty straightforward in fact, and you don’t have to be a fan of the American Songbook to appreciate it: When does advocacy really start?
Here’s what was at issue. Is advocacy, as the classic purchase funnel has it, the desired end state a marketer strives to achieve with a customer after she’s been acquired and has experienced the brand? Is it about, then, creating programs that enlist customers to help sell to other ones? So brand loyalty, ambassador and “friends and family” type programs. This was essentially the POV of the questioner, and perhaps represents the view of other veteran marketers as, in effect, this is in large part the way advocacy programs have been created heretofore.
The on-the-other-hand was this. Why not also see advocacy as not solely an end but a means? For spreading postive word-of-mouth and recommendations on the path to purchase. When consumers turn to colleagues, friends and family for information and advice as they form opinions and make decisions about what to buy or not to as the case may be.
This school of thought is rooted in some of the big shifts we’ve seen taking place in communications. How individuals are increasingly looking to each other for advice and recommendations about products, services and brands, and less to traditional institutions and authorities as a result. How they tend to make decisions faster. And how some, who are highly connected to others, are highly influential. In some cases more so than traditional opinion leaders or influentials. Full disclosure: yes, this is our POV at Weber Shandwick, and what we’ve seen in our research and work. But we’re hardly a choir of one here.
So back to the question: When does and should the beguine–that spirited dance (which is what a beguine apparently is according to wikipedia) between brand and consumer–really begin when it comes to advocacy?
You should decide for yourself (naturally). But there’s room enough for both views these days, if not the POV that there’s now a continuum of advocacy activities that are happening from the outset of the purchase cycle, and that we should be seeking to understand and harness. Social networking research makes clear that you don’t have to be a customer to be an effective advocate, just someone whose advice your audience seeks out and trusts. In fact, the most valuable customers are no longer necessarily the ones who buy the most, according to Kumar, Petersen, and Leone. Writing last year in their HBR piece entitled “How Valuable is Word of Mouth?” they showed how consumers who don’t buy much at all can be some of the strongest marketers for your brand.
Others, like Forrester, have observed that the purchase funnel itself is fundamantally broken, and a new marketing model based on engagement is needed. Our views on advocacy and the role it plays–and how harnessing it should start earlier today–are more in line with this kind of thinking.
But perhaps there’s only so much the data can tell us about a topic we know really comes down to passion. And who better than the crafty composer himself to shed some light on the subject.
So in the words of Cole Porter (click here for the full lyrics)…
When they begin
the beguine
it brings back the sound
of music so tender
it brings back a night
of tropical splendor
it brings back a memory of green
And as for the steps that go along with this tricky ryhme, nobody could make it look easier than Fred Astaire. Forget making marketing moves so smoothly. How about just dressing that cool?
Want to know what it takes to be a professional advocate online? Check out today’s article (and discussion) about 32-year old Heather Armstrong (pictured above), the hip often outrageous but always influential mom and author of the 59th most popular blog going on the Web: Dooce.com. As the reigning top blogger on all matters parenting and mom, she is one of the new faces of influence today.
Always on the lookout for clues to what makes an advocate truly an advocate, this look into Heather’s life, and the toll it can take, caught our attention. Knowledge, passion, committment, openness, a unique POV and voice, and willingness to flout convention. These qualities and more of a parent advocate, some suprising (like her penchant for vulgarity) some not, are on full display on dooce.com, along with quirky items like a daily photo of her “SuperMutt,” Chuck. See what is outshining the 200,000 plus other parenting bloggers in the world today and generating a whopping 4 million page views a month. Plus advertising from the likes of BMW and Verizon.
Peter Weir, director of “The Truman Show,” commenting on how the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey predicted the rise of reality television once said: “This was a dangerous film to make because it couldn’t happen. How ironic.” Heather’s story, and bouts with mental illness, need for therapy, lack of privacy, show that it is indeed no cake walk.
Truman, in a quest for freedom, walks off the make-believe set at the end of the movie and into a life (a happier one we hope) out of the 24/7 public eye. How will Heather’s own life-as-movie end online? After seven years of blogging, it’s not clear it will or even has to.
Here is some interesting evidence that badvocacy exceeds advocacy. If you go to Fortune’s Most Admired Companies section on the Fortune web site, you will find that people post their thoughts on whether the top most admired companies deserve the kudos or not. Fortune asks readers: What do you think of the corporations on Fortune’s top 20 Most Admired Companies list? Should they be in the top 20? Tell us what you think. The best replies will be published here, and possibly in a future story on CNNMoney.com.
As of this writing, there were 156 postings. We did the analysis one week ago when there were 129 comments. Over one-half (54%) of the comments in our analysis about the top 20 most admired companies were negative vs. over one-third (38%) which were positive. The remaining 8% were neutral. The comments are pretty interesting and are certainly a peek into what people think about companies. As our research on advocates and badvocates shows, badvocacy gets spread more frequently.
As an example, here is a positive one about Costco:
“I was a 20 year kid when I started working for Costco. Almost instantly I was looked at as a celebrity in the town I worked. People would stop me on the street and ask me about Costco and tell me about their love of the store. In the eight years I worked there I was wa paid well and given full time employment. I worked in the regional office and learned more about the company then I ever thought I would. I know that they are not perfect and have some improvements to make but they do a good job taking care of their employees despite pressure from Wall Street to limit their compensation. I personally met the CEO. I bought in the company philosophy that the member comes first and I felt good about making sacrifices for company (like time away from my family and not getting everything to make my work life better). Costco is truely an innovative business model that could treat their employees a lot worse but they don’t because they chose not to. Needless to say I drank the Kool-Aid and 4 years away from the company I still shop there every week just to remember how it tastes. If Costco doesn’t deserve to be there no company does.”
Here is a negative one that is referring to recent problems that Southwest Airlines has had with the Federal Aviation Agency about flying planes with safety concerns:
“Southwest + FAA = Not a trusted top 20.”
Badvocacy often rules.
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal (”Ford’s Latest Better Idea”) describes Ford Motor Company’s latest campaign. What caught my eye was their strategy which is a build a grass-roots “army of Ford brand advocates.” As described further, potential customers are meant to “feel something” and “do something” about Ford such as visiting a dealer. Weber Shandwick’s research on Advocates describes this phenomenon well. Identifying your advocates early in the decision-making process is critical and understanding what you are asking them to do on your behalf is where the rubber meets the road.
Everyone is talking about Starbucks and whether it can turnaround its reputation once again as founder CEO Howard Schultz takes the reins. It’s like Coca-Cola and Pepsi wars. People like to talk about the relative merits of Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts coffee. It is perfect water cooler talk, as omnipresent as Obama and Hillary conversations which you can find on any street corner. A recent poll I read about in PRWeek (2.14.08) found that of 62 percent of consumers who regularly visit coffee shop brands, 16 percent “actively avoid Starbucks.” We would call them badvocates although the article refers to them as “active avoiders.” I was taken with the term which is why I wrote this post just now. I like “badvocates” better. That’s my vote.
It’s not really a new concept…a company enlists its customers to protest an establishment, rule or convention that might be inhibiting its business (regardless of whether or not the enlisted customers actually realize a profit motive or even care). Advocacy at work, right? Or would you say Badvocacy? Hmmm.
Burton, the snowboard manufacturer, provides a magnificent case study in how to drive advocacy through badvocacy (or is it the other way around?). It has launched a campaign to pressure the four US ski resorts which still don’t allow snowboarding to open their trails to boarders through the “Sabotage Stupidity” contest. Contestants “poach” these resorts by snowboarding down their trails. The purse is $5,000 for the boarder who submits the best video documentation of a trail poaching experience. Rest assured, Burton encourages its contestants to be respectful and law-abiding “brofessionals.”
Legal questions aside, the campaign seems to be a worthwhile business opportunity, as Evo Gear, the ski and snowboard retailer, joined the effort by adding another $5,000 to the contest pool. And one of the four resorts, Toas, just announced that it is lifting its snowboarding ban in March. Just imagine the financial rewards from the sales and rentals of boards and accessories as a major resort opens its doors to such a target so passionate about its sport.
Some quick parting lessons…
1. Advocacy vs. badvocacy depends on your perspective
2. Exploit your advocates to be your rival’s badvocates
3. Beware your competition’s advocates
4. There’s badvocacy in all of us, cash helps it surface
So…what do you readers think? Did Burton launch an advocacy or badvocacy campaign? Or does it even matter as long as a company gets what it wants in the end?
Last week I was interviewed by PR Week on the European Brand Advocacy research that Weber Shandwick conducted across Europe. The video is a useful summary of what we found and what we believe business and brands should be considering when building their communications strategies.
Avid readers of this blog probably know that Weber Shandwick is not only obsessed with advocacy but also with corporate reputation. As part of the Reputation Research team, I was thrilled to see the results of the Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient (RQ) survey proclaiming that a “strong statistical correlation exists between a company’s overall reputation and the likelihood that consumers will purchase, recommend or invest in a company or its products and services.” In other words, companies that attend to their reputations are rewarded with advocacy. Of course, we’ve known this for a long time (check out our Return on Advocacy white paper) but it’s really gratifying to see esteemed third party substantiation! Don’t miss Leslie Gaines-Ross’ blog, reputationXchange, and Weber Shandwick’s web site, reputationRx, to learn all about reputation.
