Professional Documents
Culture Documents
of brand communications
John V Willshire, john.willshire@phdnetwork.com
ABSTRACT: The brand communications which evolved in the mass media era are
becoming more and more ineffective at changing peoples’ perceptions of companies
and brands.
The connections people make and communities they form nowadays are increasingly
where they source their information; people are influenced most by people and
communities.
I believe that the future of brand communications lies in finding a way to become part
of communities, and communicate with them in a way that is shared, participatory
and reciprocal.
In this way companies can affect peoples’ perceptions of them, and make all of their
brand communications more effective.
The words ‘community’ and ‘communication’ are both hugely important to the
future of brands. Interestingly, both stem from exactly the same source:
The Latin word ‘communis’ is the root of many words we use today to
describe people and the connections they make1. In its basic form, communis
means “common, public, shared by all or many”.
Whilst community is still used very much in this sense, communication has
evolved into something very different. If we were to define communication
properly, it would be as:
People watched, read and listened passively and attentively. They did not
expect the right to reply, never mind the ability to create and disseminate their
own thoughts. But nowadays people can create, copy and distribute their own
communications as far and as wide as any company.
The people are in control, and as a result they are demanding something
different; I believe that the future of brand communications lies in finding a
way to make these communications shared, participatory and reciprocal.
If we think about what a community actually is, it will help us understand the
benefit in forming them. A community (McKee5) is:
“A group of
people who form
relationships
over time, by
interacting
regularly around
contexts which
are of interest to
all of them”
What fuels these communities, flowing through the three elements like
electricity, is the communication of information. For example:
Our ancestors thousands of years ago would come together to fend off
dangerous creatures that attacked the community. They would then
share information on how to do this with the next generation through
telling stories6.
The ‘Suffragette’ movement in the early 20th century came together to
campaign for equal voting rights for women. Their messages to
society, and to encourage other women to join them, ranged from
political rallies and marches to news-dominating acts of self sacrifice.7
If you imagine taking the crowd and gently pulling it apart, you will see the
links between individuals in the crowd; these are the relationships we form
with each other, around the contexts we are interested in.
Relationships don’t just link single communities together; people are part of
several different communities and they actually link the whole of society
together.
Coursing round this model are the conversations we have with each other and
the communications we make. As individuals each relationship we have, like
it or not, affects the way we think (Earls10).
The recent campaign from Orange11 makes this point. We are the sum of all
our experiences, and those experiences we have in a community are a result
of the other people within it; we are who we are because of everybody.
Technology has fundamentally changed the way this works; it has taken the
communication possibilities available to individuals to a hitherto unimaginable
level. It is allowing ever greater numbers of people to influence each other.
And it hasn’t even finished evolving yet (Cerf12).
Pre-industrial
Firstly, before the industrial revolution communities were very self-contained.
The people you could form a community with were restricted to where you
lived and the social strata you belonged to.
Small communities were spread across the country with little in the way of
communication to connect them together; there was little chance to form
communities around anything other than local concerns.
Any local blacksmith, tavern landlord or shop owner realised that their
participation in the local community was vital; as a business they thrived or
died on their reputation in the local area. Their ‘brands’ were built through
every interaction they had with the community.
Mass production meant identical goods could be rolled off a production line
and shipped out to wholesalers and retailers, whereupon millions of
‘consumers’ across the country could buy the same product with the same
guarantees of quality.
It wasn’t just products that were rolling off the production line. It was
information too.
More and more media forms were created and distributed like mass-produced
goods: newspapers, radio broadcasts, cinema, television. People had access
to national and international news, information and entertainment, a far cry
from the information available to pre-industrial communities14.
The creators of this information invested huge amounts of money into the cost
of production, for instance journalists to report the news and printing presses
to make the papers (Benkler15). Each day they would duplicate the news they
had created and distribute copies so wherever you were across the country,
you had access to the latest information.
People read the same stories in national, regional or local newspapers. They
listened to the same radio stations and went to watch the same films in the
cinema.
Mass media offered the perfect distribution method, but in order to capitalise
on this companies had to find something to fit within that system; every
message to every potential customer had to be identical.
Not that people needed to ‘reply’. They found brands extremely reassuring; “a
badge or promise of certainty in an uncertain world” (Feldwick20). In hindsight,
it is no surprise that brand communications worked so well in this era.
When we look back at this era, we will realise just how fundamentally things
have changed.
With the internet, email and mobile phones, we can now talk to anyone,
anywhere, about anything we like; previous barriers to forming communities
have been dismantled.
The people who form communities can be anyone connected to the
network22; there are no social or geographical boundaries.
And the contexts we can gather around can be anything we like, no matter
how niche (Leadbeater23). For instance, you can be part of a free-running
group in South Wales24, involved in creating your own online TV channel.
You could be keenly interested in the Brazilian ex-pat community in Leeds25
and follow the local news most appropriate to you online.
Or maybe you just want to celebrate how much you love your Converse
trainers26 in a social networking group where 55,000 others feel the same.
In the original ‘the six degrees of separation’ experiment, 296 people were
given an envelope to pass to the one person they thought most likely to be
able to pass it to the intended recipient. Only 66 envelopes arrived29.
With the means of production, duplication and distribution in the hands of the
people, the people are not just passive ‘consumers’ any more.
The mass production model of information has been weakened by
technological advances. Nowadays people can be involved in any stage of
the information production process, even right from the very start.
They face an audience that not only has the means to form communities
around any topic of interest they desire, but has the capability to produce
communications around these topics and related brands and products.
Yet because of the size and power represented by the brand, it makes it very
hard for people to develop a conversational relationship with it.
How do you speak to a ‘brand’? How do you become friends with a ‘brand’?
A brand, for people, can be an intimidating thing.
30
But behind every brand are normal, everyday people, just as the Wizard of Oz
turned out to be the Professor; the first thing companies need to do in order to
approach communities is step out from behind the curtain.
Like the Professor, when the mystique is gone and a company is no longer
perceived as an all-powerful, magical entity, the company’s ability to
communicate with people is not lost.
In fact, it is more likely that by holding conversations with a real person within
that company, people will find out what the company can really do for them.
Rather than the intelligence, heart and courage that the Professor was able to
bestow, through conversation as part of the community, the company can
supply exactly what each person desires. And in return, the company benefits
by forming a stronger relationship with it’s customers.
31
The ‘wiring together’ of communities in the network era is very much like the
way the human brain works (Gordon33). The neurons are the people, the
synapses which connect them the relationships and the brain area is the
context.
This process is rapidly enabling society to evolve into a type of ‘Hive Mind’34;
a collective consciousness where whatever one person knows, everyone else
will soon know (if, of course, it is important enough).
It is still constructed from the three basic elements that make up communities;
people, relationships and contexts.
Targeting a group like 16-34 ABC1 men35’ worked because every man within
that audience was fed on a very similar diet of mass media information; their
cultural reference points were the same.
36
However, society isn’t as linear as it once was. Not everyone marries at 21,
has children by 28, builds a steady middle-management career and lives in
suburbia forever after. Targeting by age group or by social class means that
not only are you including lots of people who won’t be interested, but missing
out lots who will.
The rise of niche communities means we can define ourselves by what we are
interested in. The people we form communities with are a lot less
homogenous than they used to be.
It’s not just about the number of communications though; these relationships
are not like the original ‘face-to-face’ conversations we had in previous eras.
They are a mixture of visual, audio, text or video, formal, informal, from
friends, from strangers, long or short. And can be sent from anywhere you
have network access.
Imagine the image below depicts the old relationships we made in red. The
new ones we can make, in green, link us all together, extending the number of
relationships we can have.
It is, in fact, a map of the internet39. Each little cluster represents a particular
website, and the brightness of each indicates the number of people using that
website. This is a far cry from the centralised and limited mass-media
channels of the industrial era.
The mass-media age constrained this behaviour; anything too niche would be
unprofitable for an information creator to get involved in producing, duplicating
and distributing.
With the rise of niche contexts and the evolution of these other elements,
companies must think differently about how they communicate with the Hive
Mind.
The Hive Mind; two levels of communication
In order to engage with the Hive Mind, companies must operate at two
different levels.
Firstly there is the ‘entity’ level; the entity that is the brand speaks to the
entity that is the Hive Mind. These are the traditional ‘brand communications’
crafted in bulk and aimed squarely at a majority within the Hive Mind in the
hope that it reacts in a positive way.
Now, if the Hive Mind is already positively disposed to the company and the
brand, it reacts favourably. But if not, the communications are increasingly
ignored.
Once, these same channels would then have been employed to change
opinions about a company and its brands, but their power is waning. They
are having less and less effect on people, because people are much more
influenced by each other and by what they find out online, as this chart shows:
40% Newspapers
30%
57% 55% 56%
48% WOM
20%
10%
Internet
0%
i) communicate with
people as employees,
not as the ‘brand’
ii) encourage genuine,
transparent
relationships to form
between employees and
people outside the
company
iii) work with those people
around contexts which
are mutually beneficial
Reaching out from within a company is increasingly becoming the only way to
change perceptions of the company in the Hive Mind.
What follows is The Communis Manifesto, a set of principles outlining how
companies can allow and encourage their own community to communicate
with others at the ‘community level’. Companies must:
Build relationships
These five principles are crucial in forming a bond between a company and
the other communities within the Hive Mind.
Create inner belief
Inside the Hive Mind, groups of employees form relationships around the
context of the company they work for; a company is a community.
What we have seen over the last decade is the rise of companies who seek
to combine the need to make a living with the same desires and beliefs that
other communities have. These are ‘passion brands’ (Edwards/Day44).
Each ‘passion brand’ has a central belief in who they are and what they are
trying to do. It transcends the traditional central brand team who use ‘brand
values’ in ‘entity’ communications; it is something that resonates with every
single employee in the organisation.
How does a company make sure that passion burns through the whole
organisation? Let’s look at a successful network era business, Google.
It is of course famous for having just one key motto, ‘Don’t Be Evil’
(Battelle47); no sixteen page manual of brand values, onions or pyramids, a
simple iteration of a guiding spirit.
And of course there’s the very fabric of the working environment, the place the
community meets. The ‘Googleplex’ is rumoured to be designed to make you
‘think like a 5 year old kid’, the theory being that this is the age when people
are most creative48.
For companies created in the network era this sort of behaviour comes almost
naturally. The challenge for industrial era firms50 is to evolve their industrial
business structures (Leadbeater51) into something that allows their employees
to feel as warm as possible towards the brands they help create (Ind52).
The warmer employees feel about the company, the more likely they are to
pass on this ‘warmth’ to people they connect with outside the company.
Spread the word
Employees have always been one of the most powerful brand
communications tools available to companies (de Chernatony53), but
nowadays it is more important than ever.
Every time people come into contact with employees, an impression is given
about the company they represent, whether they are the dealers on a
forecourt, an employee in a call centre, the blogger writing from inside a
company54 or the designer speaking at a conference55.
Recently, the biggest change is just how far employees are able to go in
expressing themselves; they are just as willing and able to produce, duplicate
and distribute communications as other people in the network age, and the
more engaged they feel in the company, the more eager they will be to do so.
Companies must let their employees articulate ‘community’ level
communications. Employees do not prop up the ‘third person entity’ of the
brand, but instead use their own personality to help shape the impression
people get of the company.
By letting employees take control of what they say, a company feels more like
a community rather than a faceless entity.
This is what William Sledd did for Gap56. He was a store manager who
started a video blog on youtube offering fashion advice and opinion in short
six minute shows. He put forward his honest views on fashion and the
products Gap got right and wrong.
He brought real authenticity to the notion that Gap was a community of people
who were knowledgeable and passionate about fashion and who wanted to
share their passion.
No-one at the central Gap marketing team asked him to start doing it, but
crucially no-one told him to stop either. He just wanted to communicate with
the world. So far there have been nearly 19 million views of his fifty-eight
shows57.
Given time and encouragement, they will create things which resonate with
people externally in the Hive Mind and start to become part of communities
relevant to the company.
Whether it is the marketers who change the way they converse with
customers, engineers who start contributing to open-source projects or
product designers who co-create the next widget for a company with the wider
community, employees must be allowed to build relationships however they
see fit.
Build relationships
Why would people in the Hive Mind be interested in building relationships with
employees from a company? Think about what people seek from establishing
relationships:
They spot mistakes, make improvement suggestions and debate which fixes
are the priorities, in order to make the product better. The beta test is the
social object that gets Last.FM employees talking to their most loyal users.
This builds trust between the loyal users and Last.FM; the users feel that they
are contributing to something that they feel as passionate about as the
employees themselves.
In order to let employees have conversations like these, be it about product
testing, supporting causes, or even creating brand communications,
companies need to give their employees five things:
The more that employees and people converse, then the more likely, willing
and able they will be to form new communities around contexts related to the
company and its brands.
And as employees connect with people in the Hive Mind and relationships
develop, a company will see an increase in advocacy by those people who
communicate with employees.
Create community spaces
Once relationships develop between employees and people, companies can
forge a real sense of community by creating places where everyone can
gather around the contexts they care about.
For instance, this could be physical gatherings, like the innocent village fete,
or perhaps online places where people can regularly interact, like Dell’s
Ideastorm63.
64
The communities then start to show their real worth; people and employees
can create, duplicate and distribute a company’s communications, or even its
products, together. And what’s more, the people from outside your company
will be more likely to spread your messages further of their own accord.
Allow messages to travel
Think again about social objects; if they are the things that get people and
employees talking, then they can also be used to help make people talk
amongst themselves.
What companies must do is enable the core to connect with the wider
audience to spread the warmth. It is the complete relinquishing of control of
the communications about the company and brand; “a social and reciprocal
act of participation”.
In the same way that employees like William Sledd create brand
communications from inside the organisation, those people who are close to
the brand on the outside must be encouraged and celebrated for doing the
same.
Take this example of something created at the same time as the launch of
Apple’s MacBook Air. It’s a direct remake of the TV ad which showed the
MacBook Air being taken out of an envelope to emphasise how thin it was,
and it’s called ‘MacBook Paper’66.
Not only was the video shot frame-for-frame with the ad, there was a paper
version available for you to ‘print out your own’, constructed from images from
Apple’s own website.
It is not something that would have ever come out of the company itself, of
course; a marketing department would have worried about the implications on
product perception.
But by freeing the images on their website, someone who is clearly warm
towards Apple has used the images to create their own version of the product
message, which nearly 250,000 other people then watched.
Though these people did not participate themselves, they were reached not
by the company, but by the person who took materials and inspiration from
the company and created their own version, spreading their advocacy of the
Apple brand.
Allowing messages to travel in this way is the final step in connecting to the
communities in the Hive Mind; let the people who are warm towards you
spread this warmth however they choose.
Let’s now look at two examples of companies who have used a mixture of
these principles to engage with the Hive Mind to their considerable benefit.
The caped persuaders
The ‘community’ approach to changing opinion within the Hive Mind can work
across any product or service where there is a community of interest to be
found and engaged with.
This was then used to recruit people to be The Joker’s henchmen. They were
given various missions to carry out, online and in the real world, in order to get
to the next part of the story, and similar factions of people were recruited for
other characters in the film as the ARG story progressed70.
For a year before the release, the people most important to the movie’s
success were participating in the story; they were helping to create the world
in which the movie would be set. And all that time, they were getting more
and more excited about it.
But wherever there are communities of interest forming, relevant brands and
products can engage with that section of the Hive Mind.
From the mouths of babes
Disposable nappies are not the most eco-friendly product around. With this
issue in mind Marlene Sandberg, a Swedish mother and lawyer, gave up her
job to start Nature Babycare72, a disposable nappy that was as “dry and
comfortable for babies as the best "ordinary" nappies but much kinder to
nature.”
Today the firm’s products are stocked across the US, Europe and Australia, in
national supermarket chains such as Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.
And yet you won’t have seen them fighting competitors like Huggies or
Pampers for TV airtime. They have a core belief in the power of word-of-
mouth and advocacy. On every pack this message appears:
Their mission is to create more environmentally friendly products, and with the
help of the customers who are warm to them already, they want to reach other
people who believe in this mission too.
When a new ambassador gets in touch through the website, an employee at
Nature Babycare welcomes them, sends them discount vouchers for them
and the people they talk to and provides articles and evidence to help back up
the case.
It’s a solid CRM model, and perhaps not that different from those seen in the
mass industrial era. But what has made a real difference is that those
ambassadors and customers can now influence each other through the
network communication tools on the internet.
The number and warmth of user reviews, forum posts, community sites and
more73 have continually fuelled new interest in the brand. This chart of forum
posts below show that over the last 2 years, mentions of Nature Babycare
have been brought up constantly on parenting boards and forums.
74
This means that over time awareness and interest has spread throughout the
Hive Mind; the number of Google searches for the brand in the last two years
has quadrupled.
75
And yet they have only spent £28,313 on ‘entity’ communications in the last
three years: a few pages in specific parenting magazines. In comparison,
Proctor & Gamble have spent £45 million advertising Pampers over the same
period76.
Whilst Pampers still significantly outsell Nature Babycare, it is the latter that is
focussed on building relationships with a community around them, whilst
Pampers maintains its reliance on the mass media approach.
The people, employees and company are coming together around the context
of Nature Babycare and environmentally-friendly parenting and have created
a ‘passion brand’ together.
It is only by creating warmth at a community level in The Hive Mind that entity
communications will be welcomed, believed and acted upon.
In order to achieve this, companies should follow the principles laid out in this,
The Communis Manifesto, and track their success78:
And finally, they should remember the lesson that Bob Hoskins taught us at
the end of the industrial era…
References
1
Fittingly for an essay on communities, it was a community who provided me
with this information; the Wikipedia entry, compiled by a community of people
who want to help make it the most comprehensive knowledge resource on the
planet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community
However, just to make sure that they’d got it right, I contacted Dr Stephen
Colvin, a Reader in Classics and Historical Linguistics at University College
London, to check the definition was correct.
The expert and the community both reached the same conclusion. Further
proof, perhaps, that open sourcing projects like Wikipedia are becoming ever
more reliable.
2
This definition was by Paulo Giuntarelli, the Director of the Rome National
Park (from here: http://tinyurl.com/6zpe9m, midway down the 3rd page), and
runs in full as follows:
What is Communication ?
Hamish Pringle and Marjorie Thomson (John Wiley & Sons, 1999)
9
Guardian article on HSBC Facebook, Sept 2007 - http://tinyurl.com/6y6hyv
10
“We are a we-species who do individually what we do largely because of
each other”
I like this campaign, though it may feel a little similar to some other telecoms
campaigns that have run in recent years, but find me a communications
company who charges per contact that doesn’t tell people they should really
be talking to more people…
12
“The technology isn't perfect yet, but it's rapidly improving. Even in its
present form, it's easy to imagine a not-too-distant future in which automatic
translation will allow two people in the world to message one another in real
time, each experiencing the chat in his or her tongue. Just imagine what a
significant step that will be.”
Vint Cerf
Google Vice-President & Co-Designer of the Internet Architecture
Observer, Aug 2008
(http://tinyurl.com/5lgwos)
13
The Industrial revolution - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
14
Imagine you lived through any of the previous big communications
changes; the writings of the greatest thinkers and authors could be in you
hands in weeks in a book. News from the capital city could arrive the next
day in a newspaper. Radio waves could carry a voice instantly from one
small studio to millions of homes. A music record meant everyone could
listen to the musicians and singers they loved whenever they liked. And as
for television…
‘The Wealth of Networks’, p30, Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 2006)
16
“As a species, we are not physically designed for large and anonymous
cities, low-level stress, fast food, addictive drugs and the fracturing of
communal life… we were used to the gossip and intrigue that grew from a
close-knit and interdependent group; now we must be content with
EastEnders.”
‘The Wealth of Networks’, p30, Yochai Benkler, (Yale University Press, 2006)
18
“What is a Brand”, Stephen King, 1971
19
“The value of the business can be increased in four ways:
‘Value Based Marketing’, p229, Peter Doyle (John Wiley & Sons, 2000)
20
‘What is a Brand?’, p4, Paul Feldwick (NYC Publications, 2002)
21
‘The Wealth of Networks’, p1, Yochai Benkler, (Yale University Press, 2006)
22
Current broadband penetration figures
23
“The web provides many more niches for people to start a conversation on
something about which they feel passionately. The old, industrial media,
newspapers and television, do not have enough room to cater to all the
minority interests of their readers and listeners.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomenon
30
Illustration from Geek and Poke: http://tinyurl.com/6l8vee . What I love
most about this is the littler registered trademark ‘r’ just after the remark… it is
just so reminiscent of attempts by brands to talk to people yet retain the
control they enjoyed in the mass media era.
31
Illustration by Hugh McLeod: http://tinyurl.com/6zoonv
32
This was something the philosopher Dan Dennett
(http://tinyurl.com/6ae7zb) said on the TV program “The genius of Charles
Darwin”…
In Star Trek, The Borg is a race of connected beings that disseminates all
information between the collective immediately, and wirelessly. They’re the
guys that look like this:
The Hive Mind I refer to is clearly NOT a slavishly obedient one such as the
this, where everyone automatically believes whatever information comes
through the network (although that would make everything a lot easier for
marketers).
35
The NRS Social Grade system originated in the 1950s to give some ‘human
dimension’ to readership figures (http://tinyurl.com/6hvpgv). Yet they are still
seemingly part of the toolkit of today’s industry, despite the fact we are
increasing defined by interests instead of demographics.
36
“Yes, we’re all individuals…”… yep, shamelessly stolen from here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qANMjwLmo6Y&feature=related
37
We communicate a lot nowadays:
Every day 51 billion emails (excluding spam) are sent around the world; that’s
seven emails for everyone on the planet. (http://www.radicati.com/)
Technorati currently tracks over 106 million blogs around the world.
(http://technorati.com/)
4.3 billion text messages were sent in April 2007 in the UK alone (Mobile Data
Association, http://www.themda.org)
38
“What makes someone a connector? The first – and most obvious –
criterion is that connectors know lots of people. They are the kinds of people
who know everyone.”
Large networks are sparsely connected, and small networks are tightly
connected, as this diagram below shows; though not everyone is connected
directly, they are never more than 3 steps from anyone else.
So the more small groups or communities someone becomes a part of, the
more connected up a diagram like this would be.
There is further insight into ‘Small Worlds’ in this interview with Duncan Watts:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html
41
“Here comes Everybody”, p21, Clay Shirky (Allen Lane, 2008)
42
http://www.online-publishers.org/index.php
43
“Brand Spirit”, Hamish Pringle and Marjorie Thomson (John Wiley & Sons,
1999)
44
“Creating Passion Brands”, Helen Edwards & Derek Day (Kogan Page,
2007
45
FT profile of Google (after they won the FT’s top employer award for 2008) -
http://tinyurl.com/5fb6wp
46
Fortune profile, included in 100 best companies to work for -
http://tinyurl.com/6kltqo
47
“The Search”, p137, John Battelle (Nicholas Brealy Publishing, 2006)
48
Howstuffworks.com profile of the Googleplex - http://tinyurl.com/5lcu4e
I’ve taken Tamar’s own synopsis of the article in order to create the list in the
essay. The full synopsis is as follows:
64
The innocent village fete is now held every year instead of ‘Fruitstock’, the
festival that really put innocent on the map as a brand who might be a little bit
different - http://tinyurl.com/6nop75
…and the cut-out MacBook Paper is at the bottom of this page here (go on,
make one, you know you want to…) - http://tinyurl.com/6afzcy
67
The Dark Knight - http://tinyurl.com/2op9qc
68
The Batman franchise had been brought to its knees in 1997 by a fourth
instalment, Batman & Robin, which was criticised by public, critics and crew
alike for being more of a “toy commercial” than a movie, as there was so
much pressure to create a movie with mass family appeal in order to sell
merchandise - http://tinyurl.com/6nccct
69
In the same way that brands are really owned by people, as demonstrated
by the New Coke debacle (“Brand Failures”, Chapter 2, Matt Haig (Kogan
Page 2005), the characters from comic books, though created by the authors,
are very much now owned by the fans
70
There is an extended Dark Knight case study in “The Social Metropolis”,
p65, Jimmy Maymann (Goviral, 2008)
http://www.justparents.co.uk/review386.html
http://www.reviewcentre.com/review272226.html
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/baby-bath/nature-babycare-nappies/
http://www.envivant.com/2008/02/25/nature-babycare-a-green-disposable-
diaper/
http://www.coolmompicks.com/2008/05/biodegradable_disposable_diape.php
Of course that has changed in the last couple of years with high interest levels. However
interest and getting people to change their behaviour are different things and the latter takes
time.
However Nature babycare is now stocked by the following major retailers in the UK:
Waitrose, Sainsburys, Tesco, Mothercare, Coop, Morrisons, Toys R Us, Boots, Tree of Life
(and a number of smaller retailers also.)
We have been using our ambassador programme for the last three years and it no doubt
makes a difference to our business as it attracts committed purchasers and those who want
to spread the message.
We tell our consumers about the programme on our packs, through PR releases to the media,
through baby websites and through editorials in baby Magazines.
We send out money off coupons to our ambassadors and their friends that they register as a
thank you and we get a high redemption rate on these, up to 40%.
We have high loyalty to our brand and know from research that approximately 70% of people
who try Nature babycare continue to repeat purchase. We believe that this high loyalty factor
is associated with the ambassador programme.
We have many thousands of ambassadors on our scheme at any one time and new
ambassadors are signed up constantly. Each month we get around 8000 visits to our website
and over 35% of these are looking at our ambassador system.
The interest in this system has grown over the last three years and it is our strong belief that it
is contributing strongly to our sales growth we are now in the process of linking it with some of
our major retailers to drive traffic back to their stores.
74
Data obtained from Boardreader, which is an online resource which scans
selected forums and counts the mentions… like Google trends, but for forums:
http://boardreader.com/
75
From “Google Insights for search”, the new, better version of Google
Trends (the numbers are scaled by google, they’re not absolute numbers:
http://tinyurl.com/6nczy2
76
Data from AC Nielsen
77
For a day or so I weighed up whether to call it this the Communis Manifesto
in light of 1999’s ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ (http://cluetrain.com/), which does cover
a little of some of the same ground.
But I pressed ahead because ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ covers just about
every bit ground going, it’s nearly ten years old, and as they say themselves
on the site, “This is the site as it existed then. The conversations continue
elsewhere”. This is one of those conversations.
Plus “The Communis Manifesto” is just too fun a pun to give up…
78
Measurement of how these principles perform over time is essential; for
each of the principles, there are different ways a company would gauge their
success.
Build relationships
Companies must keep track of the number of communications made, and the
number of people externally who are regularly interacting with the
communities that are starting to form.
For example, the Last.FM beta would track the number of users who have
joined the group, how many have posted a comment at all, and how many are
in regular communication.
Further tracking of the awareness and opinion on the spaces should also be
tracked; of all the people who know of but do not go to the innocent village
fete, it is still influencing their opinion of the brand.