PR Studies

Book review: Loose

Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go
Martin Thomas, Headline Publishing Group 

Marketing consultant Martin Thomas was co-author of Crowd Surfing, one of my favourite books in 2008. When I saw the new book's contents page containing such chapters as 'Not a place for tidy minds' and 'The end of planning?' I knew I was in for a treat.

In follow up to Crowd Surfing and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (my top pick from 2008), this feels like a radical manifesto. It's certainly a challenge to the micro-managers, the planners and brand consultants whose traditional role has been to offer predictability and certainty.

We live in a complex, non-linear world - and the challenge is how to 'embrace the chaos and ambiguity of modern life'.

The author is keen to stress that this is not a web phenomenon. 'Something interesting is happening beyond the world of social media: public meetings are suddenly all the rage.'

It's a social phenomenon - and an understanding of behavioural economics is more useful than mastery of technology, Thomas argues. 'The simplistic view of man as a rational economic animal doesn't appear to fit the mood of the times.'

Simple prescriptions obviously won't do, though the author does offer some broad guiding principles for successful loose organisations (on page 168). He also gives many case studies to show where loose principles prevailed (ASDA, Pret a Manger, First Direct and Unilever among them).

He quotes Google's Shona Brown discussing loose management: 'The way to succeed in fast-paced, ambiguous situations is to avoid creating too much structure, but not to add too little either.'

Those singled out for criticism include business schools that have inculcated a rational approach to business. 'We are witnessing the unravelling of the most fundamental building blocks of the commercial world and a collapse of faith in tight, empirical rational models and ways of thinking.'

Thomas writes well of the millennial generation who 'take great pleasure in subverting any attempts by authority figures to silence them.' But I should say that I'm more likely to be criticised by my students for teaching in too 'loose' a way by those who want me to give them much more precise instructions ('just tell me what you want me to do').

The author is an articulate and well-read guide. Though it's a business book and not an academic text, he frequently makes me feel inadequate by his erudition.

While there's nothing I can disagree with the in the book's premise, it's not an original idea. I'm surprised the author makes no reference to open source, whose concepts have already been taken beyond software development into politics and marketing.

And a book that makes an even more compelling case for creativity and innovation in business is Charles Leadbeater's We Think (not cited here).

But it's an enjoyable and valuable read and the challenge for many will be to learn the lessons and put them into practice.

'The principles that appear to determine the success of any social media initiative are becoming well established: be responsive, be human, be transparent... Unfortunately, most institutions struggle to live by them.'

Best budget brands

If branding is about making you feel good about paying more for a product or service than you need to (and this seems a fair description of luxury brands), then what are budget brands?

I suggest they are those that make you feel good about paying less than you need to. There has to be some emotional engagement - and usually some form of relationship too. Let's try it out. Here are my top budget brands:

1. The BBC. There's some public criticism of and much political pressure on the licence fee, but £139.50 for a year (or 39p a day) has to be good value. The most talked about programme of the week (excepting ITV's X Factor) was BBC Four's biopic of Enid Blyton, played by Helena Bonham-Carter. That's on a 'free' channel - if you have Freeview or Freesat. BBC iPlayer is also very popular if you miss a programme first time round. I subscribed to all Sky channels until a year ago, but the quality of BBC Four in particular has made me feel good about my budget move. But you can opt for an even cheaper relationship with the BBC - BBC radio and websites are free to all. It's quality public service broadcasting - and yet I still feel I have a personal relationship with the organisation.
2. Google. When did you last pay Google any money? Unless you're an advertiser, the answer will be never. Yet we rely on Google for search, and probably for email, RSS, browsing and 'cloud computing' apps too. Why does this make Google a brand? The constant innovation is extraordinary, and it defies the expectations of a free business model. These expectations mean I feel like grumbling too - why no Google toolbar (and so Google Sidewiki) in Googe's Chrome browser? Come on Google - could do better!
3. Wetherspoons. The national pub chain is certainly a brand - and they provoke a love-hate reaction because of their size and ubiquity. What effect is Wetherspoons having on back street boozers? Well, the traditional local will have to improve if it's to compete with a good range of real ale served at bargain prices - and with cheap food available all day. In reality, I suspect Wetherspoons is more of a threat to high street burger 'restaurants' and over-priced coffee chains because of its food offering, than to good local pubs. There's free Wi-Fi too. Chairman Tim Martin can be irritating, but the company's staff training and publications elevate it to budget brand status.
4. First Direct. We love to hate banks. But it's possible to enjoy free banking if you keep within limits and this bank has excellent telephone and online customer service. I've been a customer for almost 20 years.
5. Skoda. No joke. My trusty VW Passat was written off in a no-blame accident and I now drive a secondand Skoda Octavia Estate. It's a lot of car for the money, the annual road tax is just £120, I get almost 60mpg - but yet the acceleration and handling reminds me of the Mark II Golf GTi I owned in the early 1990s. It's fun to espouse an anti-brand brand and I have a good relationship with a local dealer.

I admire the public relations efforts of all of these, too. (Except in the case of Skoda, it's the ads we remember and the good PR is all delivered through a relationship with a local dealer. But that counts.)

Which other brands were in the frame? Amazon and eBay of course (but I felt that my relationship with them was more limited); Ikea (good prices and products, but I dislike the retail experience); Travelodge (needs to offer free Wi-Fi to make me consider an upgrade); Oxfam (a beacon of anti-consumption shopping on every high street); WordPress - great free service, but I don't feel any emotional attachment; Majestic Wine Warehouse: only counts as a budget experience if you like to drink better wine cheaply.

Community conversations: a case study

We took a look at the conversations surrounding a brand in class today - but I did not get to choose the case study.

ASOS sounds to me like a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer - but it's a brand that means a lot to my students.

We started with the website, and took a look at news reports, then moved onto blogs.

With Twitter it became really interesting. An appeal for photos of customers wearing leather garments was responded to within minutes. These photos became potential content for the ASOS Life Community site.

Customers were raving about the brand and its offers - and so were doing the marketing for the company. I could barely find a critical voice on the social web.

People are clearly happy to share their love of fashion and I can envisage this being true of music or sports fans - but it's not so easy to see how other organisations can so easily recruit customers to become fans.

Land of the brand

Interbrand's annual league table of global brands shows continued dominance of US brands, though financial services businesses have been damaged by the recession. The UK only has four in the top 100: HSBC, BP, Smirnoff and Burberry. What does that say about our economy?

Brands, relationships and social capital

Today's Observer column by John Naughton contrasts the impatience of the market for immediate returns with the need for a long-term approach to social media engagement. He quotes blogger Michael Foley saying: 

"There are a lot of big brands dedicating resources to social media lately, because it is the new 'bright shiny thing'. I'm worried that these big brands may feel the need to shut down these social media business experiments if they don't see results - meaning big revenue - in time for the next quarterly earnings report.

"It takes time to build relationships and develop trust, especially if you've been neglecting your customers for a long time - and most brands have. They're already suspicious of you because you're selling something. Real relationships aren't built on the salesman's need to move product on deadline. They are built on a mutual exchange of value over time. Don't think of your social media presence as an experiment, but as an investment so that you can obtain social capital in the long term."

Age of innocent

It's interesting to watch the diffusion of news and chatter as a story breaks.

Coca-Cola takes a £30 million stake in innocent. Most of us will have heard this first from the media, or will have checked the media for verification. You can also read innocent's news release (note the carefully worded title). Round one to the media.

Then the chatter and analysis begins. Many are comparing this to those other niche, eco brands taken over (or bought into) by large corporations: Ben & Jerry's, Body Shop, Green & Black's. There's some discussion on blogs, but the most telling contribution is that of Stefan Stern for the Financial Times. Round two to the media.

For the authentic, instant and unmediated reaction of the crowd, we turn to twitter. 'No, not innocent at all. Am thinking about a boycott!' Nick Band, a PR consultant, manages to be literary in 140 characters: 'Age of Innocence over as Coke buys Innocent'. Many more take a similar theme. Round three to the people.

Hei: welcome to our Norwegian visitors

I'm running a brief session on branding (personal and corporate) and social media today, together with Anderson Lima, for some visitors from Oslo School of Management. My notes for the session are here.

The photo shows the new Oslo opera house, which I visited recently on the recommendation of Svend Anders, who has organised this return visit to Leeds. (All he gets to see here is Elland Road.)

I was glad to have learnt the Norwegian greeting 'hei' (pronounced hi). I'd assumed 'hi' was an import from America; it was, but only having been exported first from Scandinavia. How appropriate, given that Viking explorers were the first Europeans to settle in North America, centuries before Columbus.

Brand, value and advertising

How's this for a marketing strategy? Avoid expensive media advertising and undercut your competitors by 50%. A recipe for success or the road to ruin?

Let's look at a case study. Beer is expensive, mainly because of government taxes. Rural pubs are closing and people are choosing to drink wine at home. Last weekend a pint of beer cost me £1.37 in one country pub near my home and £2.70 in another just a mile or so away. The cheap beer comes from Samuel Smith, a small independent brewer in Tadcaster, Yorkshire - not to be confused with heavily advertised industrial brewer John Smith's from the same town. Sam Smith's is proud of its focus on product (all natural ingredients) and the lack of advertising support. I can name beer I prefer from several other small independent breweries, but none competes on price.

With low prices comes little choice: cask or keg. With low prices comes a general lack of investment in real estate, so traditional buildings are still partitioned into small rooms. This lends charm (I like to take my visitors either to the Gardener's Arms at Bilton or the Harewood Arms at Follifoot, both near Harrogate). But just to show it can invest, Sam Smith's has completed the renovation of the Dyneley Arms at Pool-in-Wharfedale. It looks great and the food's good too. (Update: since the budget, the beer here has risen to £1.44 a pint.) Not all reviewers share my favourable opinion, but a company that doesn't advertise needs all the free PR it can get, and should take the rough with the smooth.

Photo: Wharfe railway viaduct, posted to Flickr

Ted Baker - another PR success story

The cutting's old - but the song remains the same. Ray Kelvin, the boss of Ted Baker, was interviewed for Jeff Randall's Weekend Business today; he ascribed the clothing brand's success to 'limited use of PR - and no advertising or marketing.'

It's an interesting one, because most case studies that support the central thesis in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR are drawn from technology or publishing.

No publicity, mind

It started here as another exercise in word of mouth on behalf of a South African winemaker. Now it's gathering major news headlines and is threatening to become a 'brilliant-marketing-but-bad-for-business' case study. Let's hope for Thresher's sake it's not Hoover all over again.