Digital Branding

Munier-BBN’s “Maxi-Protection” campaign for BBGR wins two Top Com awards

BBGR, a subsidiary of Essilor, is one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of optical lenses. BBGR chose Munier-BBN to launch Neva Max, its high-end optical lens offering scratch resistance that is two and a half times higher than standard anti-reflective lenses.

BBGR wanted a high impact campaign that would allow Neva Max to quickly establish itself as a leader in the high-end, anti-reflective lens segment. The campaign targets 13 European countries.

The multi-prize winning campaign developed by Munier-BBN promises “Maxi protection against life’s mini-attacks” and demonstrated through three attention-getting visuals, how small gestures can create big problems for lenses (and thus the need for Neva Max’s superior protection!)

As the double Top Com awards indicate, the campaign was a standout, and not just creatively. It was also recompensed for demonstrating a direct link to the product’s performance in the marketplace.

Performance measurements at the end of the first quarter after launch showed that sales had doubled compared to the preceding generation of anti-reflective lenses as well as a 24% increase in all sales in their high-end segment. Also, a 30% increase in website traffic was measured.

Another positive effect of the campaign was cited by the client: it was the first time BBGR subsidiaries whole-heartedly adopted and deployed a centrally-developed campaign.

Strong creative, strong sales and a strong relationship established between agency and client… “Qui dit mieux?” Said Bill Below, Creative Director at Munier-BBN.

In a world where 42% of working adults in the US now maintain a profile online or have a blog, it is more strategic than ever for B2C as well as B2B companies to connect with online communities. The most innovative companies like Zappos, Coca-Cola, Ford or Dell are now investing massively in social media to engage with their customers.

Although some companies seem to have clear strategies and direction with social media, it seems that most people are still trying to figure out what to do with it. The reality is that most of them don’t have a job position called “community manager”. It should be clearly understood though that community managers must be in-house to fulfill the growing need for comprehensive online strategy. Dell recently indicated that they originally had 40 people focused on social media. They soon realized it’s not just the 40 people that need to own social media, it’s the entire company. Every person, whether it’s someone on the phone answering customer service, or any other employee, has a Facebook and Twitter account, and they are representing Dell, whether it is working hours or not.

Zappos has an extensive ecosystem of blogs ranging from “Inside Zappos“, “Zappos .tv”, “CEO and COO blog”, “Fashion culture” to “Rideshop” and more!

As for Coca-Cola they have recently updated their Online Social Media Principles. Here is an excerpt of the document about the 5 core values of the company in social media.

1. Transparency in every social media engagement. The Company does not condone manipulating the social media flow by creating “fake” destinations and posts designed to mislead followers and control a conversation. Every Web site, “fan page”, or other online destination that is ultimately controlled by the Company must make that fact known to users and must be authorized according to applicable internal protocols in order to track and monitor the Company’s online presence. We also require bloggers and social media influencers to disclose to their readers when we’re associating with them, whether by providing them with product samples or hosting them at Company events, and we need to monitor whether they are complying with this requirement.
2. Protection of our consumers’ privacy. This means that we should be conscientious regarding any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that we collect, including how we collect, store, use, or share that PII, all of which should be done pursuant to applicable Privacy Policies, laws and IT policies.
3. Respect of copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and other third‐party rights in the online social media space, including with regard to user‐generated content (UGC). How exactly you do this may depend on your particular situation, so work with your cross‐functional teams to make informed, appropriate decisions.
4. Responsibility in our use of technology. We will not use or align the Company with any organizations or Web sites that deploy the use of excessive tracking software, adware, malware or spyware.
5. Utilization of best practices, listening to the online community, and compliance with applicable regulations to ensure that these Online Social Media Principles remain current and reflect the most up‐to‐date and appropriate standards of behavior.

Sounds like they are taking their social media strategy pretty seriously, right?

The good companies know a sound social media strategy is much more than a Facebook Fan Page or setting up a Twitter account. In fact, social media has to be integrated into everything that they do – it’s a part of their overall strategy since it touches every facet of the business.

Ford has shifted its spend from 10 percent digital to 25 percent whereas its competition spends less than 10 percent of their marketing money on digital initiatives. It should be no surprise that in the troubled U.S. car industry this company is standing out and that they didn’t ask the government for a rescue package as General Motors did.

So what are the roles and responsibilities of this much talked about community manager who somewhat is to 2010 what the webmaster was to 1999?

Of course he must keep an eye on everything that’s said online about the company that’s hiring him. As Dell indicates in the point 1 of its “Social media for small business” guide, the priority is to “Learn to listen”. In order to deliver the full value of its work the community manager must not only listen but transmit all the information he can get from the ongoing conversation with the community. That’s a fantastic opportunity for a company to get insights in order to create new products and services that consumers are longing for or to improve existing ones. Want an example of what can come out of it? Listen to this: through its incredible Dell lounge, the company has developped a service that lets women coordinate the  color of their laptop with the one of their favorite nail polish!

The community manager must also identify the communities interested in the industry in order to start and to follow in the long run a permanent dialogue with opinion leaders and other influencers. He should improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through fast answer to the customer’s needs in terms of information whether it be technical or commercial.

He must cut the per-interaction cost of delivering customer service. The telephone is for many companies the single most expensive support channel. By offering a variety of other options — and implementing an automated solution that enables to transform uni-directional communications into bidirectional ones, the customer service costs will be reduced.

The community manager must be able to represent the brand well but also to manage a crisis. Of course your company is amazing and all that, but even the greatest can fail… does Toyota ring a bell? If he has done his job well, he will be on the frontlines in case of a problem with a product or a service. Depending on his talent, the crisis can be contained or evolve as a catastrophe for the brand.

So when hiring your community manager, remember that if the worst happens he must be able to inform the management as fast as possible and have the right answers to give to the customers right away. Outward online dialogue can’t be effective if there is no dialogue inside the company! Some of the most important success factors are: a good integration across all services and an ongoing dialogue with the management.

Here are my recommendations in terms of social media management:

1.            Take it seriously (your customers do)

2.            Think web and not just website

3.            Create open discussions

4.            Listen and learn

5.            Adapt and evolve

6.            Experiment

As we can see, community managers have a lot on their plates! So it’s high time for modern companies to start treating this highly sensitive position with all the seriousness it deserves.

Nicolas Jambin

Business to Consumer companies have “got it”, individuals have “got it”…

How are companies getting to grips with the participatory culture of Web 2.0?

Munier-BBN, in partnership with the Benchmark Group recently carried out a study to discover how B to B marketing and communications managers are using web 2.0 solutions today, and how they plan on integrating them tomorrow. As Web 2.0 practices in marketing and communication have been mainly studied from a B to C perspective until now, this study was especially produced to fill the lack of data in the B to B market.

This study is based on the results of an international sampling of 112 companies, from all B to B sectors, operating in Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, South Korea, Sweden, UK and the United States.

Join us for this special breakfast seminar organised by Munier-BBN, Ad Nova and the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) France with:

• Stephane Munier - Director, Munier-BBN
• Yann Gourvennec - Head of Internet & Digital Media, Orange Business Services
• Tom Scott - Communications Manager, GE Transportation
• Xavier Guepet - Head of Multimedia, Veolia Environnement

DATE: Thursday 18th February
TIME: 08.30 sharp
PLACE: Munier-BBN
63 rue Rennequin – 75017 Paris – France
Nearby parking at the porte de Champerret

If you wish to attend this event on the 18th of February, sign-up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/560639889 or contact Nicolas Jambin: +33 1 44 29 97 88

Intervet / Schering-Plow Animal Health, the world leader in animal health products, has appointed Munier-BBN to work on its new brand Nobivac. The agency has already worked on several brands of the group covering the cattle, canine and equine markets: Bovilis, Cobactan, Dolorex and Vasotop.

“One of our challenges consisted in harmonizing our product portfolio for pet vaccines. The project included the development and deployment of a strong and unique brand dedicated to pet vaccines in more than one hundred countries,” said Karin Jager, Global Marketing Director for Canine and Equine Vaccines.

“We created a new brand identity that fits all communication channels. The selected concept, Strong Bonds has been declined on a wide range of products and services for vets. We wanted practitioners to identify Nobivac as the brand that really understands the emotional bond between pet owners and their pets. Hence the signature: “Essential protection for essential bonds” said Stéphane Munier, CEO of Munier-BBN.

I just ran into a really great idea from Nespresso, the worldwide pioneer and market leader in premium portioned coffee.

I received a Facebook save the date email that redirects me to a Flash webpage: www.nespresso-whatelse.com. On that page there’s a photo of Georges Clooney the ambassador of the brand (neither Nestlé nor Georges would disclose the contract figure, you bet!) in front of a Nespresso boutique. Then you have the possibility to watch three videos that are the 5 first seconds of the TV ad, quite frustrating isn’t it? But here it becomes interesting: the users can vote for their preferred pitch and win a trip to Cannes 63^rd film festival. My understanding is that the most voted pitch will be used for the final ad release, though this is not clearly stated on the website.

The whole system is hosted on a Facebook fan page that has already reached a stunning 90 143 fans as this blog goes to print (haha!). The release date for the definitive ad is November 6, 2009. Amazingly the release of the ad has been advertized as if it was a movie, an ad campaign promoting the ad so to speak! The fan page is fully loaded with content related to the famous coffee machine: photos, twitter account, corporate greenwashing (called “ecolaboration”) and even videos such as “Coffee Experts : Learn how a virtuoso expert in aromas ensure innovation in the range of Grands Crus”. All this is very well in line with the positioning of luxury coffee making rolled-out with maestria by Nestlé’s marketers for the past decade.

If Nestlé really uses the inputs from their consumers to create the TV ad, that could be a very interesting way of creating proximity between the brand and the consumers. It’s a little bit frustrating though that the involvement of the users is pretty limited; there is no way to suggest your own outcome nor even to have real-time statistics of the votes as they evolve.

Nestlé has put a lot of money in his marketing and so far it has paid off remarkably well: the concept has really been a cash machine for Nestlé with its outrageously expensive disposable capsules notwithstanding the price of the machine (price tag between $200 and $800). Nestlé claims 2008 sales of CHF 2.262 billion (EUR 1.35 billion) – more than double its 2006 sales. In 2008, the company marked its eighth consecutive year of more than 30% year-on-year average growth, reaching the milestone of CHF 2 billion two years ahead of initial projections. Although Nestlé doesn’t disclose brand by brand profit figures, the profit margin for Nespresso is estimated at 26% putting the overall profit figure above 350 million Euros.

According to Interbrand’s latest study “Switzerland’s 40 Most Valuable Brands” Nestlé has two brands in the top three and Nespresso (CHF 955 million) is in the sixteenth position.

Nicolas Jambin

The rise of social media and what I call participative branding sets the stage for this great advertizing technique: storytelling. Originally created by political strategists, it’s a technique based on the rolling out of a media sequence over time, using levers such as controversy and suspense to create a buzz around a public figure or a cause. Today amazingly successful campaigns have been launched such as Evian Live Young (over 11 million views on YouTube and counting) or Save the Traders.

This is a technique that creates powerful bounds between your brand and the consumer, thus increasing the brand value. But apart from the hit series that make the headline, there is still a majority of these efforts that fail miserably. So let’s try to grab some of the main rules that can make your story one of the great sagas of the day:

1. It’s all about the pitch

No bedtime story please! Make it a waking up story! That’s the cornerstone of you PR strategy, so don’t hesitate to challenge your idea and to build a bulletproof concept. Find something quite shocking. As Martin Lindstrom would put it: “If you think your concept would work on TV, then it is probably too boring”. You don’t necessarily have to find something sexual or gruesome (that has been used way too much already and would not make you stand out much) but something that’s unusual, that impresses your audience or something that might trigger a controversy. You can also shoot something really over the top or impossible to do in real life, maybe create unbelievable images via After Effects or 3D. In any case don’t hesitate to inject a great deal of humor into it and break the status quo.

This is a post about storytelling, right? So make also sure that your idea has legs and that you can play around with it across several episodes and still keep it interesting.



2. Don’t play the wise guy

You want to create complicity between your customers and your brand and that will work only with a significant amount of trust. The blogosphere and online communities as a whole are like everyone else: they don’t like to get fooled. So make sure you will not use:

-          Fake identity

-          Fake news

-          Fake blogs

Or if you do, do it in a humorous way that makes clear that your whole purpose is a joke. Irony can be very powerful online but if a fake is discovered incidentally the consequences for your brand equity can be serious. You don’t want to have a negative buzz and people chatting around the web about your pathetic attempt to fool everyone. We all remember the fiasco of Sony’s PSP Fake Blog (or Flog), we’re still talking about, see, it does stick!

3. Find influential people

Before you start releasing anything you have to find influential people in your industry or potential target groups. You have to get in touch with them beforehand, showing your interest in their expertise. Read the online magazines in the industry you are targeting, get their expressions, their tone of voice, their favorite topics. After a few weeks of chitchat, it will fell less blunt if you sneak in a post or two about a brand new marketing operation. In the process you might also review your pitch a bit to make sure it will not break the implicit rules of the community.

Give them free stuff and exclusive material so that they talk about you in their blogs. Pull out the red carpet! Give them the feeling that they have the privilege of being the first to know.

4. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

Just like in a movie, it’s all about rhythm. Use the usual drama tactics, tragedy, comedy, suspense, rebounds and so on. If you skip a beat Oops! The whole strategy might collapse. You should carefully organize the sequence of events in order to keep your audience hooked on your story: Soap Operas were meant to sell soap, right?  Ideally you should make two or three different outcomes and choose the one that matches the most the reaction of your community. Stay flexible enough to adjust your messages real-time while you are rolling out your marketing actions, don’t forget to use what’s been generated by your users. You know they’ll like it, it their stuff!

5. Use social leverage

While you will probably put a great deal of money and effort in your campaign there is always cheap labor that you can use, that’s referred to as “crowd sourcing”. For instance you could organize a video contest. The winner will see his material used as part of the official online campaign. Of course one of the criteria to select the winner is a web-based voting system and you can bet that each participant will have their friends vote for them online. In order to secure their vote they will use all possible way to spread the word: Twitter, email, word-of-mouth and social media thus multiplying the reach of your communication. That’s just an example of the most used technique but you can do it on many ways. It’s just the mechanics of it that are the same, you get the idea…

6. Make it happen in real life

There’s someone behind that screen my friend! Social networks are just a mere reflection of what’s going on in parties, gatherings, concerts, fairs, shows and other events. Facebook skyrocketed from day one because it was a way for us to make the weekend last a little longer and comment on the pictures of our Saturday nights on Monday mornings. If you want your story to stick you must arrange a certain amount of PR. Use social networks for what they are meant in the first place: make people gather and interact.

Don’t forget to talk your community into some street marketing operations as well: flash mobs and stuff are efficient ways to mobilize a crowd, take pictures and re-buzz the whole thing!

7. Reward your fans

They have worked so hard for you, they deserve to get paid for that! Put sharing services at their disposal, allow them to create personalized goodies and t-shirts, make them stars. The whole dynamics of buzz-making is to become influential by making people shine. If people think that participating in your campaign will make them interesting or even famous, they will go a long way to serve your cause.

As a bonus here is the IAB Social Media Handbook that gathers the main best practices of social media communication. Have a good reading!

Nicolas Jambin

That’s a pretty shocking thing to say for sure. But most people don’t realize that when it comes to the dynamics of online communication, they are just scratching the surface. Online communities didn’t happen because of technological changes only, as sociologist Stéphane Hugon would say “Social networks come to slake a thirst for dialogue”. I will try to illustrate my point by telling you a story that might actually happen to you.

Suppose you are a marketing manager in a company that sells chocolate products. You have read somewhere that it is important to have a blog if you want to do effective webmarketing: it’s good for SEO, blah, blah, blah and anyway since everybody has got a blog nowadays you have to have one, right? So you go to the nearest blog platform, Blogger, WordPress, you name it and here you go, you start your own blog. You are an ambitious person and when you do something it’s not a joke of course. Your objective is to be seen as a serious blogger. Here’s your commitment: “I’ll write at least one post a week, come rain or come shine!”. So what’s going to happen next?

The first month you will have plenty of inspiration to fill up your blog with content inspired from your marketing material. You will probably talk a lot about yourself, about your company’s specific approach to chocolate, your incredible production process and the incomparable taste of your products.

Halas you get very little attention at that point! When you watch your traffic on Google Analytics it’ a bit deceptive. “How come nobody is interested in my great content? What am I doing wrong? Blogging was supposed to be a traffic driving killer app!”. You know that Rome wasn’t built in a day though and you are a tenacious marketer so you keep on writing…

After a few weeks of copy pasting your marketing brochures on your blog you start lacking inspiration. You are overwhelmed with angst and the fear of the blank page. But suddenly here comes the light: “What if I read other blogs, print magazines and all kinds of literature about chocolate?”. Great move my friend! Now you read everything you can get your hands on and every week you have a great chocolate-related subject to write about. Sometimes it is about world food and Indian chocolate cookies, the next day it’s about the new trend of chocolate tasting gatherings or the UK Chocolate Week event. Suddenly people who search information about their favorite food start running into your content.

Ha-ha! Finally some traffic! And guess what? In the process you have moved up on the chocolate learning curve. After six months of intensive blogging you start knowing something about chocolate, the events, the experts, the competition. All these weeks you have struggled to find inspiration where not in vain: you have taught yourself a lot about your product. Your traffic isn’t yet what you would like it to be but it’s getting better. And the best part is yet to come…

You blog now has 30 posts or so and it starts looking like a real blog! You have gathered a few loyal readers and they even start leaving comments. Some of them are quite chocolate savvy and when you go too far with your chocolate theories or if you rely on weak data, they don’t hesitate to remind you of a few hard truths. They might even invite you to discover more relevant information sources or to read their own blogs and you realize that you are now a member of the chocolate community.

Finally you can celebrate your first anniversary as a blogger: champagne! Word of mouth is doing its job. Many people trust your authority and they cite you in their own pages with a link to your blog. In the excellent “10 rock solid elements of effective online marketing” blogger Brian Clark makes this great statement “What other people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself”.  It’s especially true on the web. Your readers now have the feeling that they are part of a community of privileged insiders who know everything before it’s released. And they want the rest of the world to be aware of that.

With all these comments from influential chocolate specialists and the brilliant chocolate-related content that can be found in your blog, your page rank is impressive and you appear at the top of the chocolate-related searches. The people who find you are amazed at the depth of your chocolate thinking, they recommend you to their chocolate-addict friends, you become an influencer. You are now getting some recognition for your chocolate knowledge. Actually you are so into your chocolate blogging that you don’t often think about checking Google Analytics to monitor your blog’s traffic, but when you do… WOW! Now that’s a popular website!

A few months later, knowing your market and your consumers’ needs inside out of course, you successfully launch an amazing product portfolio. Cautiously targeted chocolate opinion leaders have received a first wave of your free samples and it’s an instant hit! You are the guy who understood before everyone else the all new trend of organic goat milk chocolate. Your community of addicts gives you real-time feedback through Twitter and your next release will turn the industry around. You know exactly what your customer segmentation is, what they do, where and when, your positioning is razor-sharp. You know exactly how to talk to your market and your messages hit  the right target at the right time. Congratulations!

Nicolas Jambin

The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies has just released its latest report (downloadable in PDF for free of course) with the provocative title of “Anarconomy”. The report claims to witness the current trends of free content distribution, mainly over the Internet: Wikipedia, open source software such as OpenOffice and Linux, books, music, films (and the content of this blog for instance) which the creators make freely available. To them this trend is going to get even stronger in the coming decades.

After a quick definition of Anarconomy (Anarchy + Economy = Anarconomy), they start a prospective excise (that’s the primary mission of the institute) following two scenarios: “Rebels Versus Cartels” and “The Age of Empowerment”.

The first scenario envisions a future where the Internet is heavily regulated. States will be constantly watching our activities online but with the goal to protect citizens and create justice – ‘Big Mother’ rather than ‘Big Brother’. Of course one of the collaterals of such a situation is the development of a network of hard-liners called PirateNet that is totally illegal but lets its users do whatever they want on the web. Unfortunately the alternative network is of course slower and less efficient.

The second scenario, “The Age of Empowerment” describes an idyllic vision of a totally open society where dictatorship, knowledge and technological barriers have disappeared. Anyone has the opportunity to produce a wide range of products themselves thanks to 3D printers that can easily replicate any object.

In the last part of the report the authors acknowledge that there is still a way to make money in this new environment. They describe business models where distribution of free content can help make millions if well orchestrated (think Google). It gives a lot of very interesting insights on how to conduct business today and in the coming years that open up a whole new field of development for product and services.

It’s always refreshing to read content produced by academic people who are references in their fields. The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies is composed of people who do in-depth research and analysis. Since most of us don’t have time to do such stuff (we’re busy doing business of course!) it is worthwhile taking 30 minutes to read this report.

Nicolas Jambin

Members’ report 3/2009: Anarconomy

Strangely, there aren’t that many big communication agency bosses who are blogging. Is it because of the lack of time or because of their ignorance of the digital communication? The answer is probably different for every individual.

Some of them do however, and when it is the case they do it well. A good example of this is the blog of Nicolas Bordas, president of TBWA France launched on Friday the 11th at 5:00 PM. The launch was actually well orchestrated with a teaser over many blogs in the industry and a Twitter countdown in the fashion of: “In 4 hours, you’ll finally see a picture of Disruption. Go to the Blog nicolasbordas.fr at 5:00 PM. Sensitive souls refrain ;-)”.

Nicolas Bordas is actually pretty tech savvy since a quick Google search returns his Blog appearing in the first results , alongside his Twitter and Facebook accounts. He is a man who knows something about e-reputation as you will soon read in his latest book “L’idée qui tue” (The idea that kills) to be published in October 29, 2009.  He was actually kind enough to put a link to our Blog in his blogroll .

Thank you Nicolas!

Nicolas Jambin

http://www.nicolasbordas.fr

It looks like eco-friendly cars and new technology get along very well. Indeed the Cambridge, Massachusetts based car-sharing service Zipcar has an amazing iPhone application coming up. With its 325,000 members it’s the largest car-sharing service in the world and has revenues growing about 30% a year with an IPO expected for next year.

Here again the main target group is composed of young, college-educated, higher-income, environmentally conscious, techno-savvy Facebook and Twitter users who will soon enjoy the pleasure of unlocking their cars with a phone!

The app tells you what cars are available and uses GPS and Google Maps to direct you to it once you’ve made a reservation. The car even tells you where it is parked by sounding its horn.

To illustrate the fersh spirit of this incredibly innovative company, I can’t resist showing the video it has made on YouTube to present its services. Completely offbeat, the video is inspired by the 80’s corporate video tapes, well in line with the Geek culture’s references:

The company’s core values:

1. be zipsters
Develop a sense of belonging and an unparalleled user experience for our membership community

2. be the best we can be
Support personal growth, impact, and excellence

3. deliver results
Create enduring value through growth

4. keep it simple
Win through simplicity and continuous innovation

5. have an impact
Change the world through urban and environmental transformation

Nicolas Jambin

www.zipcar.com