Circos Brand Karma

Recently I was trying to buy a ticket online on Tiger Airways, a budget airline that operates out of Singapore and serves Asia.  Though I knew about Tiger, I’ve never flown it.  So I did 2 searches, one on Google, and one on Twitter, both using the keywords “tiger airways.”  Here’s what I found: Google’s first search result page returned 10 results, 6 led to a booking engine, 4 to information (including wikipedia).  Twitter returned 20 results, 0 led to a booking engine, 4 tweets were positive, 3 were neutral, 2 were questions, and a whopping 11 were negative (for math lovers that’s a -35% net favorability if you consider questions to be neutral).  Below are screenshots of the top 5 results from each service (click the image to zoom in).

google v. twitter results for tiger airways, July 2009

As you can see, while Google does a sufficient job at presenting facts, Twitter is much more human with personal pet peeves for all to see.  Also, I had no idea how old the sites Google pointed me to were, but I had a pretty good idea that the tweets about Tiger were all very recent, and therefore, more relevant to me.  Finally, Google abstracts are often an incomplete description of the website, whereas Twitter posts are mostly complete thoughts.  This slight difference is the pivotal one as it relates to brands.  In this example, whereas Google invites travelers to find out more, Twitter users unabashedly present their point of view so travelers don’t have to find out more.

For a traveler deciding, let’s say, between Tiger and Air Asia (another low cost carrier), you don’t have to read a lot of tweets to quickly form an opinion for how they’re regarded by their customers.  As the tweets predicted, I encountered a problem buying my ticket on Tiger’s website, and was instructed to call customer service.  While on hold, I was reminded at least 5 times that Tiger won the Best Low-Cost Airline of the Year in 2008 from CAPA within the on-hold loop music, which ironically made me question the validity of the award.

Why?  Not because I don’t respect CAPA, but because the tweeters’ complaints were entire consistent with each other and with my booking and customer service experience.  Some were further backed by links to news reports that reported on similar incidences.  On the other hand, I had absolutely no idea who at CAPA selected the airline and under what criteria.  The tweets I read made the professional CAPA opinion and award seemingly obsolete and dated, and the award did not lessen my growing doubts about Tiger Airways.

Is my brand experience typical?  I think more and more so.  A brand’s story becomes fragmented when there’s dissonance between what it tries to portray vs. the actual customer feedback.  That “promise gap” can shred a brand and render its messaging useless if the feedback is antithetical to the brand portrayal, and the brand either ignores the feedback or insists that the opposing feedback came from outliers.  In the past, customer feedback have been exclusively behind the brand’s firewall or embedded in private conversations and emails.  Message forums led to review sites led to blogging, each made customer feedback more public.  Twitter is all of those combined, with rocket boosters, and equipped with efficient search internally and to be externally discovered (via Google).

While consumers may initially approach Twitter with high skepticism, if they consistently read tweets that mirror their own experiences, they’ll start to accept and believe in the wisdom of the tweeters.  This is why the “follow” function is so powerful.  On Twitter, you can follow anyone you trust, and stop following anyone who gives bs, which is unlike Facebook where the person you want to friend (in order to see what they have to say) has to accept your friend request.

Given the rapid growth of Twitter, learning from travelers who are otherwise inaccessible to you but who happen to know what you need will become even more pervasive in the coming days.  The operative word here being days.  Where else in the world can a traveler go to find the right micro-segment of travelers who have the exact relevant, current, and credible knowledge they need?  Not travel agencies, not brands, not travel books, not travel magazines, not CAPA, and I posit, not even their friends and family.  This, coupled with the speed and reach of Twitter discussed in part 1, are the key ingredients to a paradigm shift for brands in the travel industry.

If you want more context about why Twitter works, you can read Granovetter’s seminal work on the Strength of Weak Ties.  For a non-academic version, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point covers the main idea as well.  From Wikipedia, the central premise is,

In marketing or politics, the weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties.

That, is exactly what Twitter does with amazing efficiency.

I was on a panel with Karthik Siva at the Asia Luxury Travel Market in Shanghai where we discussed traditional vs. “new wave” branding.  Karthik is the visionary behind Global Brand Forum.  The panel was moderated by Siew Hoon Yeoh of Web-in-Travel (aka WIT), the conference where we launched Brand Karma last year.  Though he represented traditional marketing and I represented “new wave,” I found much in common with his thinking.

One such common perspective revolves around the purpose of a brand and its importance today.  Luxury brands have long understood the need to define a unique purpose and have been fulfilling it by manifesting features to not only justify their price point, but also to retain customers.

But what about non-luxury brands?  Does price trump all?

I don’t think so.  Some of the businesses that have filed for bankruptcy actually used price as a key differentiator (e.g. Mervyns) or resorted to using price as a tool to stimulate volume (e.g. General Motors, Eddie Bauer).

Hoteliers around the world are dropping prices.  At the same time, in the eyes of travelers, hotel stay experiences have become more generic.  I hear a lot more statements like “I can’t tell the differences between these hotels,” and “the rooms are all pretty much the same.”  I also see it on the trend graphs in Brand Karma.  If customers don’t feel passion for their product, hoteliers may have to use pricing as the strategy because it typically has an immediate impact of driving volume… at least for a while.  But that’s not sustainable in the long run.  Both General Motors and Eddie Bauer created products that customers didn’t want to buy… eventually even lower prices didn’t work because both brands failed to inspire or stand for something that consumers cared to spend any money on.

Hence hoteliers, if you haven’t already done so, now might be a good time to do a quick check up on your brand purpose.  You don’t need to hire a consultant to do this.  Just answer these questions honestly:

1. Why does your brand exist?
2. How is that relevant today?
3. What are you and your staff doing to deliver on the brand promise?
4. How is what you’re doing different from what your competitors are doing?
5. Would your customers agree with your answers?

The answer to question 5 is critical, and the impact of a “no” or “I don’t know” could be devastating.  Check out AT&T’s change in its upgrade policy for the iPhone and also the site about consumer credit card rules for a sense of how things could evolve.

As a starting point, take a look at what’s been publicly expressed about your brand.  This will give you a pretty good idea, whether you agree or not, at how your guests really felt about their stay experiences.  Because their reviews are public, their words also shape potential customers’ impression of your brand when they research your brand — which has a direct impact on whether consumers book a room at your property or not.

Finally, even when not reviewing your brand, users express strong opinions about what ought to happen, echoing general consumer sentiments or raising expectations.  This may have a significant impact on the relevance of your offering.  For example, Gary Arndt recently tweeted something I’m sure many travelers think of:

• “So many places say they have ‘internet’ but do not mention if it is free or if it is just a computer in a common area”
• “I know free wifi is becoming the deal breaker for me and a lot of other people. Hotels should take note”

How influential will people like Gary Arndt be?  His tweet currently reaches over 72,000 followers.

Last week a well-respected hotel chain stumbled in creating viral videos that were insensitive instead of funny.  Enough’s been said about that so let’s move on to something more positive.

Gillette’s new campaign surrounding the idea of “manscaping” is funny and effective. In research they found that 1 in 3 men shaved parts of body other than their face, and before they ran the campaign they tested the videos for with both men and women to ensure that they wouldn’t be offended.  The videos have a cartoon character teaching you how to shave different regions of the body.  The result is a viral video home run, of which the most popular in the series has already garnered over 600,000 views in 2 weeks.  You can probably guess which region that particular self-help focuses on.

The campaign is clever and brilliantly help Gillette establish their brand with younger males at the time when Gillette is expanding its product line beyond shaving to personal hygiene.  By using YouTube, Gillette is where these consumers are.  To draw them to Gillette, it focused the content of the video on something younger males would relate to (when you factor in age, I’d bet younger men shave other body parts more than older men, so the figure is likely more than 1 in 3 younger men could relate to the videos).  Finally, by making them short and funny, Gillette enabled the early discoverers to then spread word of the video through their social networking channels such as Twitter and blogs.

It’ll be interesting in the following days to see how the humor of manscaping translates across cultures.

From time to time I get asked to cite examples of a brand that does a great job of leveraging Web 2.0 to enhance its brand story.  With the ease in which anyone can post something about their brand experience, its easy for brand stories to get fragmented.  Recently the impact of social media on Domino’s pizza, as well as the instant fame that Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent, are examples of how influential social media has become.  Susan Boyle’s video on YouTube has been viewed more than 51M times — which has not only established her as an overnight brand but also cemented the show (and people like Simon Cowell) as the de facto talent discoverer worldwide.

The examples above are accidental in that something extraordinary happened and the parties were accidental victims or benefactors of the ensuing buzz.  But what about a brand that has actively embraced Web 2.0 as part of its strategy?  A few months ago I saw the t-mobile commercial that featured a dance in Liverpool station in London.  That video has been viewed more than 11M times and generated a lot of buzz for the brand to make it fresh.  T-mobile just followed up on April 30th with a live singing at Trafalgar Square.

The video itself undoubtedly will be as viral as the first commercial, but its the user-generated content from the event itself that will not only further the buzz but increase the specificity through which t-mobile’s brand stories can be “narrowcasted” by the participants to achieve even further impact.  For example, when I searched for “t-mobile trafalgar” on Flickr I found over 300 results, and there are already over 150 results on YouTube.

The “Life is for Sharing” campaign is right for t-mobile because the inherent nature of what t-mobile does is to connect people together so they can share — hence the tagline isn’t a stretch.  But the campaign they’re running to leverage Web 2.0 makes the sharing real.  By creating these singing and dancing events t-mobile also created a platform for participants and passerbys to experience something extraordinary, and the very devices and services they use to tell their friends and family can all be easily linked back to what t-mobile has to provide.

In a brilliant twist of “in-the-know,” the singer Pink is also in the Trafalgar video.  Her brief “just one of the crowd” presence, in addition to the perfect product placements of participants taking pictures/videos using their cellphones while the event is going on goes to show how well t-mobile and its ad agency understand how to leverage Web 2.0 to enhance its brand story.

Similar to the participants of Trafalgar and Liverpool, hoteliers should expect their guests to share their (hopefully extraordinary) stay experience.  Some will do this in text, others will further enhance with pictures and videos.  Each new post will either contribute to or detract from the brand story.  It’s unwise to ignore what these customers are saying, as unlike guest satisfaction surveys which can be seen only by the hotel staff, these posts are publicly available to anyone.  At a minimum, all hoteliers need to be aware of what is being said.

For hoteliers who have a communicative customer base, a business strategy that incorporates Web 2.0 and social media as part of the brandstorytelling will lead the brand to have better awareness, favorability, loyalty, and ultimately, profitability.

Incidentally, I will be speaking about this topic at the China Travel Innovation Summit, an event that is sponsored by China Travel Daily in association with PhoCusWright.  Hope to see you there.

PhoCusWright just released their top 10 trends for travel technology for 2009-2010 and I couldn’t agree more with what they said about Business Analytics and Intelligence becoming more important in the current economy.  We’ve heard many people who have expressed similar sentiments, particularly as the expected ROI on marketing dollars gets closely scrutinized.

Brand Karma is a business analytic tool for social media.  Social media’s true impact on a brand’s bottom-line must be understood for businesses to remain current, credible, and relevant.  Much of the data warehouses that have been built over the years focus on transactional business data — i.e. how has your business performed after sales.  But what about why?

How your brand is perceived in social media will increasingly hold important answers as to why your business is performing a certain way as more people rely on social media to inform their purchases.  Hence brands that understand the linkage between its performance and its perception will understand the true purchase drivers, and can therefore be very focused in aligning their organization to deliver superior value on those drivers.

For a look at the industries whose consumers are researching social media prior to making a purchase worldwide, you can check out this report from Universal McCann.

Which would you choose?

I think most of you would select Kleenex if it were the same price as the grocery store generic.

And in that question lies the importance of brand equity in these times.  As more and more hoteliers drop rate to sustain volume, some of the sacrifices that they make come at the expense of upholding their brand promise.  The problem with this is that while the price tactic might drive volume in the short term, it may not necessarily increase the number of loyal customers if the sacrifices comes in the form of service or other features that has been associated with the brand.

Hoteliers have wonderful opportunities when deploying price cutting campaigns to win customers.  Their focus shouldn’t be just on driving volume, but attracting and developing loyal customers.  In a contracting market, to maintain the same volume the customers must come from somewhere else (e.g. your competitors).  Therefore, if you reduce price to increase volume, a portion of those customers will be new ones that came from your competitors as a result of your lower price.  What will you do to get them to come back a 2nd time … nth time in the future… and at a higher price point?

The answer lies in what is the brand promise you present when these customers come in through your doors.  You must love them to win them.  Brands that do not compromise on their brand promise in these times have the opportunity to win new loyal customers if they take the loyalty factor into account when planning their campaigns.  Just focusing on volume and not loyalty is short-sighted; this tactic makes the numbers now, but when the market recovers what the customers associate with your brand is just low price, i.e. just as it’s hard to make people pay (the good-time) Kleenex prices for generics, it will be hard for people to pay a higher price for a hotel that has lost its brand promise.

With social media and user generated content having persistence and being publicly accessible, compromises in brand promise experienced by customers will be documented and become part of the brand story –and brand marketers will have a difficult time regaining control over the story.

A few articles today have focused on this Stanford and CalTech research that shows the brain tells us that wine taste better if it is more expensive. From CNET,

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

“Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”

If I were still a marketers, I’d be jumping up and down! First, I’d be thankful that the report probably provided me with the ammunition I needed to ask for a budget increase. (half-kidding <g>) But more importantly, I’d be taking stock of what my “nonintrinsic attributes” are, and I’d want to know how they contribute towards the perception of quality and value.