In advertising they’re called Lovemarks and they’re defined as brands that consumers adore “beyond reason”. The theory is based on twin drivers of love and respect and goes like this…
Products don’t command love or respect. Fads attract love, but without respect they’re just a passing infatuation. Brands attract respect. On the other hand, Lovemarks command both respect and love.
Lovemarks are based on a holy trinity of mystery, sensuality, and intimacy. I’ll stop there before I’m driven to put on a sack cloth, hold hands with colleagues and sing kum-ba-ya.
Facebook is an iconic brand. Apple’s another obvious lovemark. In the USA, so is big retailer JC Penney. All these brands have their detractors but they also command vast amounts of love and respect among millions of people.
Coke’s been right up there as an iconic name for a very long time so it’s fascinating to see the brand-consumer relationship being played out in public on the University of Singapore campus this week.
Coke installed a vending machine emblazoned with the slogan “Hug Me”. If you do, you’re rewarded with a free can of the sickly soft drink. It's all in the video below with some footage tacked on of a cool interactive customer interface.
You can’t help but feel that a tactic like this might be the Next Big Thing for Australia’s politicians to restore their flagging relationship with voters. “Hi, I’m Julia or Tony – hug me,” has a certain ring to it.
Lawmakers often overlook the unintended consequences of their actions. Take the London Olympics for example, where the self-declared “first social media Games” could turn decidedly anti-social.
The Brits have pushed an Act through Parliament to ensure the intellectual property rights of the London Olympics are protected.
Nothing unusual about that – it happened in Australia long before Cathy Freeman went anywhere near a naked flame. It’s just part of the price countries pay to hand over a city for a fortnight to the private company called the International Olympics Committee.
The Guardian newspaper reports that the British legislation goes much further than existing copyright protection. Legal opinion is that someone in the London crowd uploading a photo or footage to Facebook could be prosecuted for breaching criminal law.
The Guardian says using “2012” in connection with terms like “London”, “medals”, “sponsors”, “summer”, “gold”, “silver” or “bronze” is another likely breach. An event called the "Great Exhibition 2012" was threatened with legal action over its use of "2012" but it was later withdrawn.
With ambush marketing in mind, Twitter has agreed to work with the London organisers to ban non-sponsors from buying promoted ads with hashtags like #London2012
Back in the years BS (Before Social), the Australian Government was so sensitive to its own legislation that it referred to the 2000 event as “the Sydney Games” and avoided using The O Word in official communications.
Owners of the Olympic Hotel in Sydney’s Moore Park, located a short stumble across the road from a Games venue, were threatened with prosecution unless they changed its name, despite having long known by the O name.
Common sense prevailed and the dogs were called off.
Much of the same will probably apply in London, even if the draconian law looks, sounds and smells like an ass.
It might say on your ticket that you agree not to “license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet".
But does anyone think the Olympic Police are going to knock on the door after you go home and confiscate your smartphone?
Unless you’re working for a non-Olympic sponsor, the PR consequences would be dire.
More on the games and social media here if you're interested (and that's where we borrowed the image.)
The Urban Dictionary defines “hipsters” as “a subculture of men and women typically in their 20's and 30's that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter”.
Tight jeans, thick-rimmed glasses, shaggy or androgynous haircuts are a trademark of this mainly white grouping. Hipsters yearn to be “effortlessly cool”. The label has its origins in the jazz scene of the 1940s and in the ‘50s and ‘60s you might have called them “Bohemians” or “beatnicks”.
Why does this matter to a blog that’s about PR and media? It’s about Facebook buying Instagram.
Instagram is a free smartphone app that applies a filter to a user’s photo to make it look vintage, shadowy or a faded pastel colour. Yes, it’s that useful.
Instagram is like an extension of an arm for a hipster, smartphones being a pre-existing part of the same limb.
Many people are wondering why Facebook would pay a billion bucks for a company with no discernible revenue stream and barely more than a dozen employees. A company that still hasn’t worked out how to moneytize its service.
It’s about engagement.
Instagram has 31 million users. They upload an estimated five million photos a day. All of those users have email addresses and have given away snippets of information to use this free service.
In a digital economy information equals money.
You still have to wonder if Instagram users are somehow a premium commodity.
Thirty-one million people is a substantial customer base to build on in anyone’s language, but a back of the envelope calculation puts the value of each of those users at a tad over $33 each.
Even the dialect of Facebook - where they regularly deal in numbers with strings of multiple zeroes - that's a massive chunk of change to reach pretentious tossers in thick-rimmed glasses and ironic slogan T-shirts.
Working in PR throws up some interesting facts. One is that Malaysia is officially where retailing, social media and online lonely-hearts meet.
The New York Daily News reports that Kuala Lumpur retailer “Shoes Shoes Shoes” is offering customers a free date with every footwear purchase.
Women who buy a pair of shoes and leave their details are matched with potential partners by an online dating site. These men are selected from the agency’s database after nominating a pair of shoes that they like.
From there, it’s like an episode of Perfect Match, Malaysia-style, as the store’s Facebook site explains:
“Buy a pair of shoes from a gorgeous selection in the store and dating consultants will pair you with an eligible bachelor who likes the same shoe design as you and arrange for the two of you to meet. The end? Of course not. To prove that chivalry is still very much alive, a gift in the form of a shoe discount voucher awaits you on your first date, courtesy of Prince Charming. Sounds like a fairy tale? Well, who says life can't be one for real. So get to it girl! Let the shoes decide your destiny.”
At least there’ll be an icebreaker if both dating parties turn up in Prada pink and purple sling-backs.
Facebook comments have ranged from “brilliant” to “supremely creepy.” The media coverage is going gang-busters with 60-plus online news articles and counting.
Apart from consenting podiatrists engaging in mutual foot massages, does taste in shoes really make for compatibility? If there’s probably a scientific study that says so, you can bet the evidence will be as credible as last week’s horoscope.
Leaving aside puns about these shoe-focussed couples being toey or turning out to be heels, the reality is that shifts in match-making are as seismic as those in media. For example, a 2009 study found that nine percent of married Australian couples met online.
While the date-and-dine thing looks more a quick grab for publicity than a way to put couples on the path to life-partner bliss, if the boot was on the other foot and you wanted to make a mark in retail, you might wish you’d thought of it first.
You can tell a lot about a sporting club from the way it markets itself for new members. Take the Magpies of the AFL, Collingwood Football Club, 120 years old this year.
It brags that it’s the biggest and most famous sporting club in Australia. It’s won 15 premierships. It’s contested 43 grand finals, more than any other club. It’s also lost 26 grand finals (two draws), more than any other club.
Its club song ends embarrassingly with Oh, The Premiership’s A Cakewalk For The Good Old Collingwood. It’s said that Collingwood supporters believe the last words of Advance Australia Fair are Carn the Pies.
But all this, like pointing out its premiership droughts from 1958 to 1990 and 1990 to 2010 is nitpicking. Where Collingwood excels is rabid cradle to grave supporters, a record membership base of almost 73,000 and a financially astute club management led by Eddie McGuire that, like AC/DC, is strongly Back in (the) Black.
For 2012, it introduced a clever piece of membership marketing that draws on Collingwood’s reputation as the club other clubs love to hate. “It’s Us Against Them. Now is the time to decide. Are you with us?” the ad asks as new coach Nathan Buckley, ‘side by side’ with his players, faces the opposition hordes like William Wallace and his army in Braveheart.
Collingwood’s masterful ad has fine heritage. The voice-over is by Jack Thompson (They hate the sight of black and white that fills the battleground; and they hate our army chanting its intimidating sound).
Our Jack starred as coach Laurie Holden in the classic 1980 movie The Club, the Bruce Beresford/David Williamson homage to Collingwood and football club intrigues everywhere.
Marketing the Australian Football League’s newest team, the Greater Western Sydney Giants, has been a different kettle of fish. There is no tradition. No century of history. An untried team of teenagers based in rugby league heartland.
A confusing name: try GWS and you’ll get Melbourne insurance brokers or a Sydney recruitment company. Or worse. At least, there’s nothing to match the scores of tasteless jokes about Collingwood supporters. Yet.
The marketing saviour for this multi-million dollar AFL investment is one man. Kevin Sheedy. The former plumber, Richmond champion and Essendon super-coach over three decades, he is the voice, the face, the historian, the sage and the stuntman of this new club.
He’s brought his media smarts, his guile and tricks, his play-acting with Eddie McGuire, and above all, his deserved reputation as an innovator of the game and a leader in recruiting indigenous players, to Sydney. GWS membership is 7755. The membership drive features coach Sheedy as much as his largely unknown players.
Sure, the billboards feature rugby league import Israel Folau but, in Western Sydney, he’s hardly a giant alongside Nathan Hindmarsh.
It’s been Kevin Sheedy on the front cover of glossy mags, Sheedy in front of the 80-year-old Harbour Bridge, Sheedy the newspaper columnist and TV guest. And it will be Sheedy who commands the headlines until tomorrow night when they play the club song, described by one wag as backing music for a dancing Boris Yeltsin.
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That’s when the youngsters of GWS hit the turf at Sydney Olympic Park against the ‘Moneyball’ team of the AFL, the mighty Sydney Swans*, with the AFL hoping for a crowd of 40,000. That’s when the nation’s top draft picks play their historic first game and maybe then the GWS marketing can move from the coach to the players’ achievements.
It probably doesn’t rate as highly on the PR failure scale as an Italian cruise ship captain claiming he’d fallen into a departing lifeboat, but it’s a clear case of not looking before you leap.
The BBC reports that an advertising agency for car maker BMW last week took up the naming rights for a weather system on their client’s behalf.
The idea was that everybody talks about the weather so they’d mention a cold front called “Cooper”- and give the BMW-manufactured car model some profile.
Berlin’s Free University uses the “Adopt a Vortex” sponsorships to fund its meteorological service.
Their outlook probably didn’t foresee the severity of Cooper contributing to more than 100 local deaths.
BMW was forced into a defensive apology and is probably still counting the negative PR cost of their $250 outlay.
That damage won’t be lasting but you have to ask why an ad agency would recommend a sponsorship where the outcome was uncertain and any brand association upside negligible.
A bit of risk analysis never goes astray. Closer to home, if you plan on placing ads on an edgy FM radio breakfast show or sponsoring an accident-prone NRL or AFL team you might want to call us.
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