When big brands go underground (and the lessons they learn)
I’ve been taking part in a marketing experiment.
Now usually, I’m quite wary of these sorts of things. Partly, it’s because I’m just naturally wary. And partly, it’s because I don’t like being manipulated.
But in this case, price trumped principle.
So I gave in.
Another way
So what is this marketing experiment?
Well believe it or not, I’ve changed mobile-phone operators. Now if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I’m a bit of a phone tart, so it won’t really come as a surprise.
Over the years, I’ve jumped into bed with Virgin (don’t go there), T-Mobile and 3. And now I’ve found a new partner, who meets my needs to perfection.
It revels in the bizarre name giffgaff, which is an old Scottish word meaning mutual giving, or giving and receiving. You’ll see why in a moment.
It’s a SIM-only operator, and has great prices. It’s got a funky website, and an active community that’s ready to jump in with help and advice.
But they’re not doing it because they’re kind, selfless and altruistic. Well maybe they are, but that’s incidental.
Their real motivation is that they’re paid to help others. You answer a question in the forum, you get points. You send a SIM to a friend, more points. You do virtually anything, and you get points. And points mean one thing.
Prizes.
Every so often, they have a reckoning, when your points are converted into hard cash. So I recently got an email saying I’d earned the princely sum of (drum roll) 17p.
Mind you, I’m not exactly what you’d call a joiner, so my participation was somewhat limited. And I’d only recently signed up, so my activity was limited even further. Still, 17 pence is 17 pence, and it’s not to be scoffed at.
Neither is £200, which 40 giffgaffers earned. Or the £654 that another one managed to clock up, presumably by spending most of his time answering questions rather than making calls and sending texts.
You get the idea. It’s a let’s-all-muck-in approach. You’re no longer just a number, as it were. You’re a valued member of a growing community of people who’ve realised – in the now-famous words of NatWest – that ‘there is another way’.
They take an open-kimono approach to virtually everything, including pricing. They actively solicit suggestions and regularly implement them.
Their tone is deliberately informal. There isn’t a hint of corporate-speak in any of the communications they send out.
When I sent an email to support, the response time was a disappointing 24 hours. But I forgave them as soon as I read the first line of their message: Sorry it’s taken so long, Kevin, but we’ve been very busy here at giffgaff towers…
Can’t you just see it? Wing-back chairs, ancestral portraits, a roaring log fire. Heavy oak doors that creak satisfyingly, and narrow spiral staircases that lead up to turrets. A camp Gothic-revival mansion nestled in a valley somewhere deep in the West Country.
Actually, no.
The reality is somewhat different. And that’s where the experiment comes in.
The SIMple truth
OK, let’s open the kimono a little further.
giffgaff, you see, uses the O2 network. In fact, giffgaff is O2. Wholly owned, operated and managed by O2, but run as an apparently separate entity.
So swivel chairs, not wing-back. Climate control, not log fires. And sliding glass doors, not oak ones.
And you can forget the rolling hills of the West Country. We’re talking the concrete jungle of Slough (be still, my beating heart).
So funky, hip, off-the-wall giffgaff is wholly owned by O2, which in turn is wholly owned by Telefónica, the Spanish telecoms giant.
Seems a little less appealing, doesn’t it?
Well, yes and no. The thing is, giffgaffers know all this. And guess what? They don’t care. They get unbeatable pricing, good service and those points just keep stacking up.
Which means so do the prizes.
And O2? What’s in it for them? Well quite a lot actually. But first, let’s look at some of the cons of their little Truman-Show-with-phones experiment:
They run the risk of devaluing the O2 brand.
They’re so successful they start cannibalising the O2 market.
It fails miserably (unlikely).
These are far outweighed by the pros:
They reach a market that O2 doesn’t appeal to.
They’re so successful they start winning significant chunks of business from other SIM-only operators.
They learn some valuable lessons that can be applied to O2′s core business.
Costs are minimal, and can easily be written off. There’s no advertising and they don’t do call centres.
If it all goes wrong, they pull the plug, hang a ‘For sale’ sign on giffgaff Towers and move on.
So everybody wins – except possibly the competition. Which is nice.
And if it does all go wrong, what will I do? Well I’ll take rejection in my stride, pick myself up, brush myself off and get back in the mobile dating game again.
After all, that’s what phone tarts do best.
Find out more:
Give a little, get a little. You get out of it what you put into it at giffgaff.com.
Getting creative, sending out signals and finding the perfect name
Three unrelated themes this time.
Except they’re not.
They all take something that’s ‘obvious’ and turn it on its head. They’re about coming at something from a different angle, and solving a problem creatively.
1. Brick in the wall
It’s three whole years since I highlighted a funny, compassionate and intelligent presentation by Sir Ken Robinson at TED entitled Do schools kill creativity?
It appealed to my inner rebel – and my outer one too.
And I wasn’t alone. His landmark talk was downloaded over 4 million times, striking a chord with a global audience.
And now he’s back.
His 2010 talk – Bring on the learning revolution! – will make you stop and think about how best to find your niche. His central idea, that ‘education dislocates people from their natural talents’, is a powerful and persuasive one.
He also talks about the ‘tyranny of common sense’, something we hear every day in the business world (‘we’ve always done it that way!’). And why education shouldn’t be linear (because life isn’t).
It’s all there – from Eric Clapton to fast food, from dreaming about being a fireman to why nobody under 25 wears a wristwatch (do you?).
Enjoy.
[If you're reading in email, click here to see the talk on TED.com]
2. Tomayto, tomahto
What’s your company’s tone of voice?
And before you say business-like or professional, think about who you like to do business with. Businesses or people? Faceless and anonymous, or personal and friendly?
Would you like to do business with your company?
I thought about tone of voice again this week when I re-read a blog post from the Wise Old Man of Marketing, Seth Godin.
Writing, he says, has an accent. And actions have grammar.
He’s right. Everything we say, everything we do, every interaction we have with people sends out a subtle message.
Don’t know the difference between principle and principal? (Find out.) Think you are sounds more professional than you’re? (Think again.) Don’t have an address on your website? (Include one.) Don’t make it obvious what your prospect should do next? (Change that.) Like to include ‘takes up to 28 days’ to make sure you’re covered on delivery lead times? (Nothing takes a month.)
Everything sends out a signal, whether we like it or not.
So what signals are you sending out?
3. It’s all in a name
Can’t think of a name for your business? Tell me about it.
Actually, don’t. Instead, jump on over to Wordoid.com. And you’ll have a new business name in next to no time.
The idea is simple – you suggest a word to use as the basis (e.g. tech, shop, idea, high, first, micro) and it’ll create a new word for you.
You can choose to put your word at the beginning, middle or end of the new word. And you can choose to make it sound natural, almost natural or (bizarre, but actually kind of funky) hardly natural.
It even checks whether the .com and .net domains are available for the new word. And best of all, it’s free.
Every January, I play a little game. I check how long it is before I see the evergreen headline New Year, New You! somewhere.
In past years, winners have been my gym, The Times, and my ex-ex-mobile phone operator (brand loyalty isn’t my strong suit).
This year, the winner was Tesco. For there, above the magazine rack in my local store, were those four fateful words. And it was only 29 December. That took the biscuit (low-fat, Light Choices, of course).
Why does it work year after year?
Because change is good. Any change.
And what goes for our faces, figures and jobs also goes for our businesses, brands and corporate image.
The constant constant
No brand can afford to stand still. But not all brands change for the same reason. Some want to, some need to, and some do it just because they can.
So why would you want to change your brand?
It’s stale. What seemed like a great logo, tagline or look simply doesn’t cut it any more. You’re tired of seeing it, tired of hearing it, tired of putting it out there. And guess what? Your customers probably feel the same way.
It’s invisible. ‘Brand blindness’ inevitably sets in among your target audience. Been there, done that. Nothing to see, move on. Change your look and they’ll sit up and take notice again.
It’s falling behind. Makeovers are a me-too thing. If everybody else is doing them, and you’re not, it doesn’t matter how strong your brand is. It’s a game, so learn to do it well and often.
Sometimes, there’s simply no option. A takeover, for example, means that somebody loses out. When HSBC took over Midland Bank, a brand that had been on UK high streets for over a century disappeared without a trace.
The same happened recently when the Spanish giant Santander swallowed up Abbey, Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester. But when it comes to brands, bigger isn’t always better, as Barclays’ ill-fated ‘big bank’ advertising campaign proved.
Consumers like choice, and smaller banks, with a cosy, corner-shop feel, are preferable to huge multinationals. In an interesting development, the charmingly named Williams and Glyn’s bank looks set to re-emerge from the rubble if the Royal Bank of Scotland is broken up.
Froth with wings
Times change, and brands do too. Could there be a more iconic brand of the boom era than Starbucks? From humble beginnings in 1970s Seattle, it spread around the world and became synonymous with coffee.
Dot.com entrepreneurs hung out with grungy college students, lounging in battered leather seats with chill-out music wafting among the tables.
But that was then. This is now.
Big is now Bad: big banks, big investment houses, big bonuses.
Small is the new big. So Starbucks is going small again, launching unbranded coffee shops in an effort to lure people back.
So if you wander into 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in Seattle, and think what a welcome alternative to Starbucks, you’re in for a surprise.
Because it’s Starbucks.
The stuff of legend
Sometimes, you really have no choice, and a makeover is not just an option – it’s the only option.
2010 sees the relaunch of a venerable old magazine, with a 90-year track record. The new title is to be Canada’s History.
It’s not going to set the world on fire, but at least it has the virtue of being immediately recognisable and obvious. Unlike its old title, which caused chaos with spam filters in the digital age.
For up until now, it’s revelled in a delightfully unfortunate name.
…or why, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Just choose it, use it and make it work.
Often, I write for people who are just starting up a business. They need the works: web copy, sales letters, press releases, brochures. But before any of that, they have to make one crucial decision.What should they call the business?
Next to naming a business, naming a baby looks like … well, child’s play, frankly. Nobody really wonders what the market will think of Mark, John or Peter, Kelly, Sarah or Jessica. (The same may not quite be true of Brooklyn, Apple or Peaches.) A baby’s name is just a name. It doesn’t have to convey a USP or a marketing message.
But a business? Well, that’s a whole different business.
People agonise. They make up their mind. They change their mind. They change it back.
I know. I’ve been there. But in the end, you simply have to choose a name and go with it.
Really? Yes, really. After all, let’s look at some of the names we all know and love (or hate). Let’s pretend we’ve never heard them before. And now, let’s see what we make of them.
Some names instantly suggest what they do – easyJet, for example. But what about Ryanair? It’s named after the Ryan family, who founded the airline. If I were starting an airline, I’d think long and hard before calling it Walshair. But that’s just what they did, and today, it’s synonymous with low-cost air travel.
Let’s look at Amazon. Yes, it’s A to Z (look at the arrow on their logo, which doubles up as a smile). But why a South American rainforest? Does that suggest books? Surely it strays dangerously close to an alarming truth about books – that you need to cut down forests in order to make them?
How about Virgin? Say the word and you think of megastores, planes, record labels and Richard Branson. Not a virgo intacta or the mother of God. It’s hard now, with the name embedded in our psyche for over 20 years, to imagine how radical it must have been when it first appeared.
Some names indirectly refer to what they do: Surf and Tide wash away those nasty stains. Bold is brave and fearless in the face of dirt. But Daz? Omo?
Often, the more you look, the less sense a name makes. For every obvious one (Innocent Drinks, North Face, Laptops Direct) there’s one that means nothing (Skype, Asda, B&Q).
Some names are too clever – The Body Shop, for example, is a pun that virtually nobody in the UK gets. Why? Because this side of the pond, when your car is damaged you take it to a panel beater, not a body shop.
But in the end, none of it matters. Obvious names fail (Skytrain, On Digital) and not-so-obvious names are runaway successes (Starbucks, iPod).
The moral of the story is simple: it’s not the name – it’s what you do with it.
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