Building benevolent and believable brands

As we know, WOM and referrals are playing and increasingly important role in people’s purchase decisions.

So my thought for today…

In this period of austerity brands that show greater benevolence and believability will be more likely to amplify customer attention and loyalty.

First off, by benevolence I mean stressing caring ethics in these uncertain and trying times. Simple but effective ‘physical world’ monetary examples include M&S 'Dine in for £10' meal for two offers and Sainsbury’s ‘feed your family for a fiver’ menus.

Brand benevolence can be further enhanced through digital media. For example the Celebration Facebook widget helped build relationships between friends. It did so by enabling them to send virtual Mars gifts containing mobile barcode redeemable at PayPoint stores. After all who doesn’t like receiving chocolate as a gift?

Social media also gives brands the opportunity to develop longer term relationships with consumers by getting inside and shaping the flow of conversation. However for many brands this appears to be a notoriously tough nut to crack, but needn’t be.

This leads to the second point contained within my thought for today…

As with ‘real’ life, if you want to be perceived as interesting you have to actually say and do something of interest. Translated to the world of marketing, this means building believable brands that meaningfully engage people based on their needs, wants and actions.

By believable I mean:

• Communicating with honestly and transparency
• Doing what you say – delivering on your promises
• And in delivering on your promises, doing so in a compelling and rewarding way

For example GSK’s NiQuitin and Alli products (NRT smoke cessation and weight loss capsules) also give access to personalised interactive support plans. Delivered primarily through online and mobile media they provide access to experts and social community support, advice, tools and inspiration. Arguably with development these programs could become the key ‘value’ components in their own right in driving consumer uptake with the product given away for ‘free’.

Finally, in becoming benevolent and believable brands this also helps humanise them towards forging stronger, more intimate relationships with consumers. And through these intimate interactions this creates more brand advocates…which leads right back to where we started.

The Death of the Destination Website?

I’ve recently been involved in a debate about 'The Death of the Destination Website'.

This was sparked by the fact that more and more internet users are pulling content of interest from sites via RSS feeds, widgets, podcasts and the likes so reducing the need to visit specific websites. Such tools are in effect acting as filters. In addition to which we are also seeing more and more people subscribing to the curated behaviour, views and opinions of other people – in effect trusted ‘tribe’ leaders. So it’s not just tools that are acting as filters but also people themselves.

So let’s get back to the debating point about destination websites. Do brands need them? Or is it better to focus marketing spend and efforts on being in the flow of consumer conversation thereby negating the need for a website presence – or at the very least a ‘front-of-house’ version of this?

If portable content enables brands to meaningfully engage consumers without ‘forcing’ them to visit a destination website, perhaps it’s more profitable for brands to invest more of their marketing £££s on ‘fishing where the fish’ are.

However there are still many people who prefer, want or need the total brand experience (perhaps akin to say the different consumer shopping experience of buying the latest iPod product from Curry’s versus the Apple store).

So what if the construction of a brand’s website became truly ‘modular’ beyond the current RSS et al capabilities? Within this concept all content would still exist holistically within the website (giving the full brand experience) but it would also thin-slice into a variety of consumer driven content typologies that exist outside of the website. In addition, this portable content could have intelligence built into it (semantic web apps) to help anticipate and meet peoples’ needs in being really interesting, relevant or useful. This could be further strengthened through brands adopting an ‘open’ philosophy of encouraging consumer content collaboration and making it easy for them to pass on to others.

Take for example someone that exhibits search and browse behaviour particular to booking a holiday. Just think of the possible benefit to both consumer and brand if British Airways could serve an ad within the browsing site that gives this person the choice, in situ, to either purchase tickets; request further specific details; set up a mobile phone price alert; IM friends with the details; as well as visit the website for fuller information.

So to end, I believe it is both simplistic and folly to sound the death knell of the destination website. Instead it is better to suggest that the concept of the monolithic website is dying out. Perhaps this will lead in the not too distant future to the evolvement of the modular website – where consumers engage with content in its assembled or disassembled states according to their individual needs.

Importantly with the above scenario it’s not really a question of website content versus portable content; but one of developing ubiquitous content that co-exists independently or interdependently to a brand’s website.