Influential Marketing Blog

FinnAir, Republic Day & Why Celebration Is The Best Marketing Strategy

A few weeks ago it was my birthday. The day before on a Saturday morning, my two boys came leaping into our room very excited to wake me up. It wasn't so much about my birthday, unfortunately, as it was about getting ready to do their favourite thing on a Saturday morning: going to IHOP for pancakes. And when there is a birthday involved, it is an even bigger deal. Your birthday is a celebration there. They bring over at least 6 of the wait staff to sing their own version of the birthday song to you. You get ice cream for breakfast (what kid wouldn't love that?).

People love celebrations - and they love to be at the center of attention. Birthdays are easy. Probably any restaurant would do something special for your birthday. But what about the moments that people forget to celebrate? 3 days ago was the first day of the Chinese New Year. It is the Year of the Dragon. What did your business do to celebrate? Unless you happen to be Chinese, probably nothing. 

Life and culture gives us plenty of moments to celebrate, but often we let them pass without doing anything. If we could, however, it would be an unexpected delight. Today FinnAir offered a perfect example of that - as they filmed and posted a video on YouTube of their cabin staff performing a surprise Bollywood dance on a flight from Helskinki to India in celebration of India's Republic Day:



South Asians and anyone with a passion for India (or marketing) have been sharing this on Facebook and talking about it all day today. It is going what you might call "micro-viral." In other words, it is going viral among the exact small target community that a marketing team should care most about - people highly likely to travel to Southeast Asia. The timing is perfect too, as one of the things that many South Asian families start to think about at the beginning of the year is planning their travel for the rest of the year. And flights to India get booked far in advance.

So this surprise dance has a potentially beautiful marketing payoff - to get people who are considering travel to India later in the year to consider using FinnAir to get there. As of now the video only has a few thousand views. Perhaps it will never get a million or more. But by offering an unexpected celebration, they have positioned their brand as one that offers a connection to India (literally and figuratively). My guess is that it is already paying off.

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

Marketing From Hell

Tomorrow I am going to Hell ... literally. There is an area on Grand Cayman Island nicknamed "Hell"  thanks to some black limestone formations that (as legend has it) caused a local at one point to explain that "this is what hell must look like!" As you might expect, the area has been turned into a tourist destination, where the star attraction is a Post Office which specializes in letting you send a postcard home directly from Hell (with official postmark included).

Imagine for a moment that you had the challenge to create a destination based on a normal natural phenomenon like these limestone formations. Sure, a catchy name like "hell" would certainly help ... but your real goal isn't just to create a memorable experience - it is to create a shareable one as well.

How many tourists do you think visit Hell and DON'T send a postcard home? Not very many. Part of the fun of going there is sharing it with friends and family back home. In Hell, they don't have signs asking visitors to please join a neglected Facebook page or follow them on Twitter. Their marketing is built into the experience itself - and it works because of it.

The next time you are considering some method of desperation marketing to get your customers to talk about the experience you offer, remember that the ideal solution might be to find a way to make word of mouth an inherent part of how people interact with your business. The result could be creating something as shareable as going to hell and back in an afternoon.

How Australia Uses Social Media To Celebrate Immigrant Experiences

Australia has a unique problem that almost no other country in the world would be able to understand. With a population of just under 20 million people, the country is one of the few places on Earth that anyone might be able to describe as underpopulated. The vast distances most people must travel to get from their home countries to Australia is certainly part of the reason - and the long history of violence against the native aboriginal people (much like the US history with the Native Americans) has led to drastically reduced native population.

Until just the last few decades, Australia was a place which also held onto a fairly racist immigration policy - legislating first against all immigrants, then against Southern Europeans (such as Greeks and Italians), and then against all others until finally in 1973 the country finally adopted the same open immigration policy as most other developed countries of the time.  Slowly, the country began to actively court people from all cultures to come to Australia. When I lived there from 1998 to 2003, I remember being struck by how invested the government was in getting people to join the culture and become Australian. They even had television ads where the call to action was "become a citizen."

Last year, the Australian TV channel SBS launched an interesting documentary series online designed to celebrate one sector of the immigrant experience - people who had come from Africa and built their lives in Australia. Told with an interactive website featuring videos of real people - the campaign offered an inside look at the success stories and real lives of African immigrants in Australia.

It is exactly the kind of campaign that every country should do more of. The immigrant experience is a critical part of the success of many countries, and recently it seems to be under a sort of undue scrutiny from many cultures as reactions to fundamentalist groups, potential terrorism and misguided fear mongering have led to a new rise in popularity for isolationism.

Preventing immigration is not the solution. Australia may have been one of the slowest countries in the world to realize the value of an open immigration policy - but now they celebrate it with campaigns like this one. Let's hope other developed countries can follow their example.

What I Learned From An Eccentric Norwegian Millionaire

By anyone's measure Christian Ringnes would have to be described as an odd man. He is a millionaire in Norway thanks to his real estate investments and well known thanks to his funding of philanthropic projects such as a $300 million sculpture park in Oslo. His wealth and noteriety has also afforded him the luxury to also create a monument to his surprising lifelong hobby ... collecting miniature liquor bottles.

It is a common collection among those who have travelled often - particularly on KLM where a blue and white set of Dutch house shaped liquor bottles have become so iconic they are actually still given out to passengers even in today's austere era of airline cutbacks. So when Ringnes' wife suggested that he find a better home for these bottles which he had been collecting since childhood, he decided to do it.

That home is the world's only Mini Bottle Museum, which also doubles as an event center hosting parties and private events. After a day of discussions on corporate reputation at an event in Oslo, we ventured into the museum for a tour and private dinner.

A part of the tour was a home-video style introduction to the museum, recorded with Ringnes as the star. Throughout the video, visitors could watch his antics as he paid happy American collectors cash to buy their collections, wheeled 4 huge suitcases with his "bounty" onto airport trolleys, and even took his obsession a big step over the line by jumping into a tub full of (hopefully) empty miniature bottles.

The museum itself features a built in slide, a monthly award for the "tackiest miniature bottle" and even a fake brothel with a collection of 40 custom bottles from the 40 legal brothels in Las Vegas. All of which brings me to that marketing lesson that Ringnes offered through his museum: when you have a passion for something many people consider silly, the best thing you can do is not to take yourself too seriously.

Good advice even if you don't happen to be a quirky Norwegian millionaire.

Why The Future Of Travel & Destination Marketing Is All About Curation

Life is good for the traveller who knows where they are going. There are dozens of great and useful sites online where you can see everything from reviews of hotels to side by side comparisons of airfares from one destination to another. Planning a trip to San Francisco was never so easy ... but what if you haven't answered the first and most important question of where you want to go? All of a sudden, life is a lot more difficult. Finding out about destinations is a labrynth of government sponsored tourism sites, linkbaiting sites promising information about a destination but only delivering a long list of pay-per-click links, and individual attractions within a destination.

For a traveler still trying to decide where to go, life isn't so simple ... but curation can help.

A hot topic among those who work in social media is the idea of curation and how individuals can share their knowledge and passion on any subject not only by creating original content about it, but also by scouring the web and curating the best content into a single location. Back in 2009, popular travel writer Rick Steves spotted the potential of this idea early when he wrote a blog post about the "Travel writer as curator" - sharing his view of what the guidebook of the future might offer.

Today content curation is rapidly finding roots in the highly immersive world of travel as more people share their personal experiences as a way to influence others on not only where to stay and what to do ... but also where to go in the first place:

1. Jetsetter

A part of the hugely successful online luxury retailer Gilt Groupe, Jetsetter is a private online community filled with curated deals on what the site calls "the world's greatest vacations." The site features up and coming travel bloggers like "monkey connoisseur" Farryn Weiner and former hospitality industry workers to hand select travel locations and experiences which are then offered to members. You need to be invited into the network, and all deals are only offered for a limited time. (Note: the links in this post include a $25 joining incentive). Popular deal website Living Social is also offering similar curated experiences on a more local (and less costly) level at their Living Social Escapes feature.

2. Trazzler

A community built from submissions by travel writers, Trazzler now presents those experiences with a focus on those which are within driving distance of your home as opposed to exotic locations around the world. The smart model used by the site encourages people to share local experiences that they are passionate about in exchange for the chance to win local trips. You don't need to be a travel writer or prolific blogger to participate, just a person with a great story and recommendation to share. It is a curated content model at its best, because they are encouraging writing and content creation from those who have a passion but don't necessarily have a place to share it ... until they find Trazzler.

3. Offbeat Guides

A site that has been around for a few years, Offbeat Guides specializes in letting you create and print your own guides to destinations on demand. A key unique factor for these guides is that you can enter your dates that you will be travelling to a destination and where you are coming from to customize information such as the weather reports for that time period and currency conversion rates. Bringing together curated content from across the web, the guides offer a collection of information that is updated in real time and generally more reliable than travel guides which can be months or years out of date. If only the site allowed you to include multiple destinations in one travel guide (ie - London & Oslo) so you wouldn't have to carry around two guides if you are hitting two destinations, the idea is being partially duplicated now by a few other sites like Stay.com.

The Bottom Line: Curation is already transforming the way that people answer the all important question of where to go, but so far innovations are coming more from technology based startups rather than destinations themselves. In the near future, we will start to see more local, state and country tourism boards as well as convention and visitor bureaus using curation to better promote their destinations to all kinds of travelers. 

The Tower Of London’s Big Marketing Mistake

The Tower Of London is one of the most popular tourist attractions in London with many sources of tourist information proudly declaring its heritage as a place where hundreds of years of history have taken place, royalty have walked and prisoners have been tortured. It is this last point that awakens the imagination and captures the interest of many of the tourists who visit this place. With its gruesome history including the beheading of Ann Boleyn and usage of torturous devices like the "Rack" and the "Scavenger's Daughter" - it is shamefully entertaining to imagine these times of torture and suffering.

Outside the Tower of London, they certainly take advantage of this more barbaric time in the history of the Tower with imagery and promotional materials - right up until you buy the ticket and actually walk inside. As you walk through the Tower, nearly every sign mentioning this history of torture takes great pains to point out that very few prisoners were ACTUALLY tortured here, despite the number of devices and legends of torture over the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems like a classic case of modern historians trying to rewrite their own history to avoid admitting that perhaps some of the ways of the past were not quite so regal or heroic as they have been written.

Instead, what if the Tower of London admitted its own history ... one that at times was bloody and led to prisoners being tortured, but one that is also now over. Admitting your own failures is a tough thing to do, but sometimes avoiding an obvious truth can be worse. The Tower of London misses the mark and undermines its own credibility in the process. Are you unintentionally doing the same with your business?

Most of us are not so good at admitting and even publicizing our mistakes. If you can do it, however, you can create a much more powerful bond with your customers because they know what you have struggled with in order to get to the point that you are at today.

The Tower of London needs the context of the bloody time in its nearly thousand years of history to put today into context. Most businesses need this context as well. Standing apart for trying to project the perfect image is the obvious thing to do. Instead, if you could let your customers inside to know your biggest mistake and how it helped you to shape your business today, you could not only inspire your customers, but also give them a story to share with family and friends.

This post is republished from my original article on the Amex Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog, where I share ideas and marketing techniques specifically to help small businesses stand out. To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

How A Curated Competition Helped Find A New Logo For DC

If you come to Washington DC as a tourist at any time of year, chances are you will spend at least a part of your trip visiting some of the most iconic museums and national buildings in the city. Outside of most of them are a collection of street vendors selling an assortment of life-sized cardboard cutouts of Obama and tacky shot glasses with the Presidential Seal on them.

One of their best selling icons is a t-shirt which is a simple copy of New York's well known logo - "I Love New York" - with the city name replaced. It is just one symbol of what I have seen spending most of my childhood growing up in DC area: that it can be a difficult city to adopt as your own. Many people live in neighboring Maryland or Virginia, the vibe of the city can shift based on who gains political power and there has always been a large expat population working 2-5 year stints at NGOs or embassies locally.

Back in August of this year, at the start of the Fall tourism season for Washington DC, two young D.C.-based artists Brandon Bloch and Justin Young thought the city needed a stronger identity, and felt that the solution to this challenge could be design based. So they invited their design friends to participate in a "curated competition" to create a logo that could better represent the city.

The competition resulted in several designs, and the winner was a designer named Alex Slater who had a simple but elegant design that felt uniquely right for DC. They have been sharing this logo at local events throughout the fall and have been featured in media both locally and nationally. While many of these "crowdsourced logo competitions" awaken the ire of designers for their focus on getting design thinking for free ... the DC Love Project was different because it was a curated competition. All the designs were shown at a public event and the voting element offered a real time feedback method to help select one design to focus on promoting.

This campaign certainly helped to start defining a logo identity for the city that all of us locals would love to see ... but the bigger idea to take away is that sometimes crowdsourcing misses the chance to really value every contribution you get - a curated competition might inspire much more passion among those who participate, as well as those who will see the final result.

FIFA World Cup 2010 Marketing Roundup - 10 Marketing Lessons From South Africa

Now that the Round of 16 is over and we are down to the final 8 teams that will be playing in the Quarterfinals of the World Cup - most of the marketing that has accompanied the games has been played out and it's a good time to try and look for some lessons from the International phenomenon that is the World Cup. To help, here is my round up of 10 of the most interesting marketing campaigns from this World Cup as well as some marketing lessons that they offer:

#10 - ESPN3 Live Streaming

Offering live streaming for sporting events is certainly not new, but the way that ESPN has integrated their streaming with cable providers has been excellent. For many soccer fans, watching the World Cup Live might have been their first experience at a "pay for streaming" service online. Hulu is paid for by ads, and YouTube is omnipresent - but ESPN3 took the riskier step of integrating with cable providers. By doing so, they not only managed to prove their value to their cable provider partners/subscribers - they also managed to create a great user experience because they didn't force consumers to pay again for something they were already paying for through their home cable subscription. Big win for ESPN.




#9 - Coca-Cola History Of Celebration
Coke is an official sponsor of the World Cup and has the stadiums plastered with their logo as you would expect. Continuing with their theme of happiness that was so nicely brought to life through viral videos such as "The Happiness Machine,", their World Cup spot focuses on the story of Roger Milla and his dance of celebration during the 1990 World Cup that sparked a revolution in goal celebrations (as the ad claims). The video is set to the official theme song of the FIFA World Cup 2010 and the voice over is from an announcer with a South African accent (nice touch). The last shot of Roger Milla in the stands enjoying a Coke while the voiceover talks about how he "showed the world how to live" is pure World Cup melodramatic magic.

#8 - KIA Motors South Africa
As the official automobile sponsor for the World Cup, KIA had fertile ground to do a lot of great things around the World Cup. Unfortunately, their actual effort seemed uncoordinated and confusing - with KIA Motors South Africa running a promotion all about offering an exclusive experience to people who engaged with the South African page or Twitter account, while the global marketing team seemed to focus on the new Soul car with a 1 minute video (embedded below) asking "what's your soul app?" and randomly talking about anti-gravity apps. The US KIA Twitter page doesn't even mention anything about the World Cup, the global Facebook page offers disconnected polls and the pieces of this campaign just seem out of sync in the unique way that can easily happen when global teams work in their silos and never collaborate. One commenter on their YouTube video summed it up best in their response to KIA's question ... "My soul app is the one that blocks these kind of ads." Ouch.

#7 - Cisco Around The World
Continuing their Human Network campaign* Cisco uses an engaging ad showing a soccer juggling trick they call the "around the world" that spreads from country to country through young soccer fans watching a video and trying to recreate that moment. As a kid, I remember watching Jürgen Klinsmann in 1994 score an amazing goal against South Koreans and spending months practicing and trying to perfect the same move. Cisco managed to tap that moment that many soccer players and fans could relate to, and demonstrate how their global network makes sharing moments like that possible in a faster and more real way than ever before. (*Full Disclosure - Cisco is an Ogilvy client, but I did not work on this campaign).

#6 - CristianoRonaldo.com

Voted the FIFA World Player Of The Year in 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo (and his often photographed abs) may also be the best looking player in this year's World Cup ... or so I'm told. To capitalize on the attention, he relaunched his website during the World Cup and last week I got a launch announcement from a PR team announcing his new site as a place where they would be "pulling dialogue between Cristiano and his 5 million fans on Facebook and Twitter." After Portugal lost a close Round of 16 match against their neighboring rival Spain, Ronaldo was featured heavily in the news for his comments about feeling like a "broken man." Unfortunately, he isn't sharing this despair in any sort of dialogue with his fans and his Twitter feed has been silent since before the Spain match. The lesson it brings to light is the central pitfall in creating this "revolutionary" new model for dialogue between a celebrity superstar and his fans: the whole thing falls apart if the superstar just doesn't feel like talking.

#5 - CNN + FourSquare World Cup Promotion
CNN jumped into the geolocation bandwagon around the World Cup and launched a promotion with Foursquare where they are offering special badges to people who check in at locations within South Africa as well as at viewing parties at various locations around the world. Though they are not broadcasting the games, this is an interesting chance at experimentation for the brand and if it works I imagine we will begin to see this used by other Turner Network channels like TNT around college basketball, as well as potentially around large newsmaking events that draw a crowd at viewing parties as well, such as national elections.



#4 - Bud United House Party
You have to give Budweiser credit for not giving up on the BudTV idea even though their idea of a 24 hour online network fell flat. Around the FIFA World Cup, they leveraged their sponsorship to create the Bud United house where they invite one person from every one of the 32 finalist teams to live in a house together during the World Cup. The only rules were that when your team was eliminated from the World Cup, you were too. The result is an engaging online reality show that has a great premise, interesting content and a unique sponsorship activation. The only problem to see with this campaign is that they focused all their TV budget on running the same ad over and over where the fans try to distract the soccer player with an mosaic image of beer in the stands. If they used some of that budget to drive TV audiences to check out Bud United, they would have likely increased their engagement dramatically.





#3 - Pepsi "Oh Africa"

Pepsi was one of the sponsors that some felt "ambushed" the games to take away attention from the official soft drink sponsor (Coke) and got great buzz for their TV spot and viral video featuring people making a soccer pitch for several soccer superstars to play against kids in a soccer challenge. The not so subtle message is that Africa can achieve great things (like defeat international soccer stars) if her people can work together.

#2 - Nike Write The Future
Nike's online long form ad with the tagline of "Write The Future" can only be described as epic in how it manages to take all the top tier talent they sponsor and roll out a story that not only talks of their impact on the game and culture, but how what happens on the World Cup stage often does write the future for all of us. The World Cup is special in its significance to the world and watching this ad helps you understand and live that. If there is one ad most closely associated with this World Cup, it has to be the Write the Future campaign. Adidas still had a strong global showing  and for "real soccer players," Adidas remains the brand most focused on soccer and stands to realize big revenue gains from merchandising as a result of the games. They made the uniforms and the often debated . But for Nike to grab just a bit of the spotlight through great creative and storytelling isn't bad for a brand that was not the official sponsor.

#1 - Brand South Africa
After the games finish and the world turns its attention to the next big sporting event, the biggest winner from these games may very well be Brand South Africa. The country has had an ambitious nation branding and marketing effort in place since 2002 - and one that in part led to their selection as the host nation for Africa's first FIFA World Cup. The games have gone off perfectly and the biggest controversies to date have been the Jabulani ball and the inconsistent officiating - both having little to do with the host country. Using music and dance as a way into their culture, coverage of the games online and on television were filled with African rhythms and clearly stood out from anything else. Though the South African's didn't progress in the tournament as far as they liked, the country invited the world to their doorstep, brought out the vuvuzelas, did a disika dance and showed the world what Africa was truly capable of.

Amongst a World Cup filled with good and bad marketing lessons, South Africa deserves to stand at the top of the list with pride. Good marketing helped them get selected to host the games, and great marketing will help them inspire people to visit and invest in their country long after the final match is played and a champion is crowned.

Miss USA & The Ongoing Rebranding of Michigan

I have to admit I didn't think much of Michigan the first time I visited there. There is no shortage of not-so-great media coverage about the state and being a typical east coast kid, raised in the Washington DC area I never spent much time anywhere in the middle of the country. So when I started travelling to Detroit both for family reasons (my wife's family lives just across the border) and work reasons (Ford is a client of Ogilvy) it became my excuse to get to know the city better. I learned about the large Arab and Indian population living there. I saw another side to the city that went beyond the automotive museums and car-making heritage. And I experienced the intense pride that so many people living there share in a place that many people around the country just don't understand.

Over the last few years, Detroit and Michigan in particular have become a snapshot of America as it is today and as it struggles to become in the future. Politicians stumped there for votes in the Presidential election and President Obama still finds reason to make his way there. If there is a heart of America, at least one of the arteries would run through Michigan. On a much smaller scale, the state has found the spotlight in social media as well through events like BrandCamp University put on by a small group of entrepreneurs who believe that everything they do reflects on the outward perception of their home state. 

Tonight Rima Fakih, Miss Michigan 2010 and a Lebanese-American won the crown of Miss USA and again gave Michigan a chance to brand itself as something more than the hometown of American cars. Individually, these random things may not seem that significant or grand ... but when it comes to place that many people think they know, sometimes it takes an Arab-American beauty queen, a viral cross country drive, and a unique event to demonstrate that things are changing. There is a spotlight on innovation that is also helping to reinvent the role of entrepreneurship in the state.

Though many other states spend millions on tourism campaigns designed to change perceptions, the people of Michigan seem to be taking this task with energy, innovative ideas, and limited funding from any government source. Think what you may about Michigan's role in the global economy - but from a marketing point of view I would choose a group of people with passion over a short term marketing campaign any day. Though the state is certainly not reinvented yet, I suspect this won't be the last you'll hear about the rebranding of Michigan - or the ongoing daily things that "Michiganders" will be doing to help make it happen.