Pick up the right measures of success

A recent article in Harvard Business Review pointed out a key problem - too often, many businesses pick up the wrong measures. That means, they evaluate their success and monitor their strategy deployment through the wrong eyes. And this is as true for finance as for in-market performance. Too often, we see "number of consumers using our product" objectives set through "market share" (instead of "penetration"), "sales growth" measuring "equity strength" or brand awareness mixed with communication awareness. So, just remember the mantra of that HBS article:

1) Define your objectives

2) Assess drivers of value, based on the understanding of cause and effect in your market

3) What does it need to be done to improve performance on those value drivers?

4) Monitor regularly and adjust adequately

Take advantage of the situation

If you have a very well defined brand, with a very clear positioning, mission and benefits in it's target consumers heads, you can do something amazing - you can take advantage of tactical opportunities to surf on their social surge. A good example is what Axe / Lynx is doing in Hong Kong, saying that it will help you win 65 Million USD by helping you claim and convert a multimillionaire's daughter to heterosexuality. Isn't this genius like?

http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/lynx-facebook-gay-woman-straight/

Pay what you want

Imagine that you have a restaurant and you decide you will not have prices. Consumers will go, eat an will pay what they want. What do you think will happen? Will most of them leave and pay you nothing?

No! According to an article published in this month's Harvard Business Review, only 0.5% of patrons have eaten free (on a 2 years observations done at a self-service Pakistani restaurant in Vienna). The average pay per meal has been around €5 (which seems is enough to cover costs) and daily traffic went up more than 50%. 

So, is this a viable strategy? Well... we know it covers operational costs, but we have no idea about this strategy's profitability... 

The best brand advocates

I was reading a post by Richard Branson in his LinkedIn blog, when I stumbled upon one of the biggest (and almost forgotten) truths on marketing - the best brand advocates are its staff. They are the ones who know more about the products (and its competitors), who lived it daily, who can strongly relate it to consumer experiences, who can recommend it the most to other consumers (being it friends, relatives, anonymous people on the streets), who can defend them in countless arguments wherever they are in the most absurd situations. So, make sure they understand your brand, products, strategy, potential. Make sure they love and live the brand. Make them take pride in working for such a brand. Engaged employees are one of your best marketing assets!

Creativity and backlashes

When someone does something out of normal, it must prepared for positive reactions (that will mostly be silent) and negative (that will be loud!). The trick, is not only to understand the end game of them (did we generate more positive than negative impact) but also to manage them - meaning to boost your positive and to actually minimize your negative. 

A good example is the latest activation from Cacharel - "Searching for Diana. It was the ("true"...) story of this average guy that met the girl of his dreams during a demonstration and was searching for her throughout Lisbon. Besides massive social media exposure (Facebook, Twitter,...), the campaign actually bridged to newspapers and TV (it had massive exposure right in prime time!). But then, yesterday, the story exploded - it was a fake, an advertising campaign. It received a strong backlash from consumers that felt cheated and it received even more media attention than before - but negative one...

Now, there are a few lessons to take out from this:

- enhance your positive reception - when L'Oreal explains that this activation matches the newest Cacharel perfume campaign communication idea, I get. But I need to be explained. Nothing in the campaign actually hinted at Cacharel. Branding connection was low and too subtle - you had to actually now this connection existed to bridge it to this new perfume. So, the positive PR you could get was not reverting to the brand. You could improve this a lot by using a couple of simple techniques.

- attention to details - the story was blown over by someone that spotted that... the Facebook page that "the in-love guy" created to search for Diana had actually been created 3 days prior to the demonstration where they "met". Blunder! This has put the activation out of the brand's control.

- control the negative PR - brands need to understand that creative and different activations might generate negative reactions - specially the ones that mess up with strong human feelings like love, solidarity, compassion, like this one. Everyone fell for the poor guy searching for this girl - every guy has a "I should have gone there I and get that girl's phone number" situation and every girl wants to be desired by a stranger (especially if it is a nice and handsome guy, like this one). It is slice of life! So, brands need to understand the risks of these campaigns - and they should have plans. Plans for "this will might go wrong anytime if this is exposed ahead of time". You need to have your PR contacts ready to control and minimize this negative exposure, so that people accept this was an ad stunt. 

More than minimize negative exposure, and if it is well done, the end of this campaign (even if ahead of the planned) should be about bridging to the brand's communication core. That their core target has this romance dream, and that Cacharel keeps their dreams alive. If you shatter them by making this (great) campaign look a corporate trick, then, you are losing your "share of heart" of consumers. So, there is a lot to learn from this one - keep an eye on it.

http://www.publico.pt/Sociedade/afinal-a-procura-de-diana-foi-uma-estrategia-publicitaria-1565524