Cell C and Noahgate. Some lessons.

As I drove back from my interview with Ashraf Garda on the radio show Media@SAFM on Sunday I thought about the conversation that I have got involved in regarding the new Cell C campaign.

The whole thing started with a video posted on YouTube on Wednesday 28^th July. The video was supposed to be a segment of comedian Trevor Noah’s comedy show in which he ripped into all the South African cell phone networks.

The fairy tale was that the Cell C CEO was so concerned on seeing the video that he placed a full page ad of apology to Trevor Noah and all of South Africa, promising better service and within a few hours offered Trevor Noah the job as the CEO (Customer Experience Officer) a kind of independent referee on Cell C customer service called telltrevor . In these few hours they also set up a rather large website development.

For good measure Cell C also changed their logo and announced how they were going to change the standard of cell phone connections with a new network.

The only thing is that it’s all a fantasy.

I had been pulled into the controversy firstly by commenting favourably on the Cell C apology, naively as it turns out. You see I had never expected a major marketing company to pull a stunt you would really only expect from “Honest Joe’s Used Cars.”

I was full of praise that at last a South African corporate had understood a little of Social Media strategy – listening and then responding, swiftly and with gravitas to a complaint. Why Cell C’s Full Page apology was a Marketing Masterstroke.

I was really disappointed when I found out from blogger Marc Forrest, Cell C the Joke is on you that it had all been a stunt. I felt it important to respond and did so here Cell C is Astroturfing, What a Joke

This was picked up by Radio Highveld news and Media@SAFM. And Mandy de Waal wrote a really good article with comments on Daily Maverick

This is a pulling together of my thoughts.

1. The media landscape has changed. Customers are connected and vocal. Dan Gilmour calls them the ‘Former Audience” because they have the power to generate as well as consume content. They are active participants in the branding process.
2. The first step in new marketing is listening. Listening to what the customers are saying and responding with solutions adding to their experience  as well as with honesty and so building relationships based on trust.
3. The second is building an experience for your customer, an experience that they will value and tell their friends about, in other words build brand fans.
4. The principle underlying marketing in an always on and always connected world is that the customers have control. This could be described as a democratisation of marketing because in this world your communication is a discussion not a lecture. Brands can no longer tell customers what they should believe and with enough media spend, shout at them until they believe.
   1. New marketing is really about preparing the environment for the idea (which is what a brand is) to spread. It’s like as a farmer prepares the field creating the right environment for the crops to grow, the marketer must nurture the brand in a partnership with its fans.

So what has Cell C done wrong?

Strategically:

1. If you are going to poke the sleeping bear with a pointed stick you had better have a well thought out plan, because it may wake up.  The core of this is the customer’s experience.
   1. Does Cell C have a demonstrably better network than either Vodacom or MTN?
   2. Does Cell C have demonstrably better customer service?
   3. If not then they have set themselves up for a very bloody nose.
   4. If you want to have a relationship with your customers, the foundation of that relationship is trust.
      1. So is it a good idea to try pulling a stunt and spinning a yarn?
      2. Is it a good idea to pretend that a new independent customer service system had been set up?
      3. Why would I want to tell Trevor instead of Cell C?

Executionally

1. You don’t try to hoodwink your customer, even if you think its funny. Don’t make a fool of him, especially if your intention is to make him a hero.
2. Once you start a relationship with subterfuge it taints the rest of the relationship.
3. Customer service is a company culture thing. Pretending to outsource customer service to a comedian with no record as a consumer champion is bizarre.
4. Is appointing a comedian as your customer experience officer a message to tell everyone that your customer service is a joke.
5. Cell C has launched a new logo – but their TV ads still carry the old logo, that is just sloppy, and a message in itself.

What I would suggest:

1. Cell C get your network working, your outlets working and make sure that your customers are getting a superior experience.
2. Your customers don’t care how good you say you are, they care about their cell phone service
3. Then develope the tools to let your customers tell the rest of us about it. Because they are going to do it anyway.
4. Then go on and invite the rest of us in to join the conversation, using all media.

I am reminded of an article I read in the Huffington Post yesterday, called The dark side of vitaminwater it reveals that Coke’s legal team, who are defending a consumer protection lawsuit claiming that Coke has misled its customers into believing that vitaminwater is healthy, with the argument that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitamin water was a healthy beverage.” What twisted logic. Is Cell C under the illusion that they can treat their customers the same way, follow the same kind of strategy and same kind of defence if they get called out.

The fairy tale is just a fairy tale and we now know that. What we also now know for certain, because Trevor told us, is that the Cell C network is terrible.

What FIFA has got 100% right, and most other sports 100% wrong.

There is a massive difference between pro and amateur sport. A distinction lost on most spectators and huge amount of sports administrators.

Most spectators and viewers honestly believe that when you are watching Arsenal and Chelsea play football or England play Australia in the ashes that they are watching a “grown up” version of school football or cricket or Old Parks playing Pirates. Wrong.

Pro sport is show business, the objective of which is to generate revenue. It does so from ticket sales, sponsorships, advertising and selling television rights in the main (also from merchandise sales etc)

It operates in the leisure time/entertainment market. It wins when people prefer to watch the event than do other stuff. Other stuff includes watching other sports, going to the movies, the pub, playing cards even staying home (or going out) and having sex. They are all alternative uses of that time and some alternative uses of that money.

If you are marketing that sport you would do exactly what you would do with any other brand, improve the product to make more interesting, exciting etc than the alternative. The real win is to get more and more people talking about it. I remember a time when the Transvaal Mean Machine would pack out Newlands cricket ground, and when Clive Rice walked onto the sold out ground the Mountain Goats (Capetonians) would boo. What a win.

Think about it. If you were marketing a sport would you rather have technology bringing certainty into every decision or people talking about the human refereeing mistakes. Would you rather have a John McEnroe on centre court (whom people remember decades later) than an endless stream of bland tennis players. Would you rather have newspapers speculating over whether the player was actually offsides when the goal was scored.

It is no accident that Football is the most popular sport on the planet, that FIFA can instruct governments, even get them to pass laws in their favour. Football has the perfect formula. It’s a beautiful flowing game with an unbeatable combination of strategy and skill. It also builds heroes, villains and controversy.

Its amazing to me that those calling for electronic surveillance and decision making on the football field don’t get that
professional football, especially the world cup, is the the biggest entertainment event the world has ever seen.

If I was consulting to FIFA would I suggest that they install goal line technology to judge whether the ball had actually crossed the line? Would I advise them to replace penalties with referee awarded goals (see my previous blog post)

Not on your life. I would want you to talk about it!

No way should football be ashamed over the Suárez incident.

PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images

Luis Suárez saved a certain goal in the World Cup by handling the ball while he stood on the goal line. In the microsecond he had he went with his instinct and prevented the ball going into the net by batting it out with his hands.

That the Ghanaian, Asamoah Gyan then missed the penalty and that the game eventually went Uruguay’s way became to many a huge injustice.

I mention this is my blog because I have been in a somewhat heated debate over this ever since and it needs more than 140 characters to analyse, the talk has been of cheating and a morally sad sport. I think that a few deep breaths should be taken by some.

Did Suárez cheat? In my mind he did not. He followed his instinct. Cheating is acting with deceit, usually cheating is done with some sort of premeditation, there was clearly none in this case. there was no time. It will be easy for anyone who has played competitive sport at a high level to understand that he did exactly what 999 out of 1000 footballers, rugby players, polo or hockey players would do in a similar situation. He prevented a goal.

Did he commit a foul, no doubt, was it a foul that prevented a certain goal? Absolutely. Did he break the laws of football? without question.

What was the appropriate action for the referee and soccer to take.

The referee should have given a penalty, He did. A penalty is awarded for any of the 10 offences that a direct free kick would have been awarded in the field of play but for the fact that the offence has taken place in the 18 yd box. He should have been shown a red card. He was. FIFA then automatically suspended him from the next game. In my mind a totally appropriate and sufficient response.

But, there has been an indignant outcry though, the opinion expressed that a “penalty goal” should have been awarded (or the law changed to make this possible) and even that Suárez should have been banned for life. Maybe some would have liked to see him in front of a firing squad.

Why? because we feel disappointed and there must be someone to blame?

Any of the 10 offences that a penalty is given for could have resulted in a certain goal. That’s why its not a simple direct free kick but instead a kick from the penalty spot which is in itself an almost certain goal.

For the referee  the decision is then very easy to take, he judges the facts. We wouldn’t still want the referee to make the highly subjective decision to award a goal because he, in his opinion, believed that there was a 87% probability that the foul would have resulted in a goal and only a penalty kick because the probability was a mere 79.3%. The Laws of Football are simple and easy to apply in most cases and their simplicity is one of the reasons that football flows in the way it does.

The law is also beautiful because it introduces that bit of skill and the penalty has still to be converted, still giving a chance to the team possibly wrongly penalised by a human referee error and adding interest for spectators.

Those who feel the urge to criticise the game of football, and brand its players, supporters and administrators as condoning cheating could maybe think of this.

Sure the fact that the Ghanaian player choked meant that the “wrong” team went through to the next round and disappointed millions of Africans. Me included.

Certainly Suárez’s subsequent behaviour has been poor (the “hand of god” comment) and worthy of criticism.

But all the rest of the attacks on football, the administrators and the Law are totally inappropriate.

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We are going to need artists.

In a lecture room in Johannesburg on Wednesday, I finished my class with a slide with only strange square image that looked like a haphazardly coloured in chessboard. The title on the slide was “Your class assignment.”

For the past 6 days I had been running a workshop with 38 of the future leaders of the creative industry. A class of copywriters, art directors and designers all students at the countries leading advertising school. The topic was digital marketing.

On the first day I asked the obvious opening question. “Who of you have blogs?” Not a single hand was raised. On the second last day of the workshop the students aimed their cell phone cameras at the square QR “barcode” on the screen, which led them to a website landing page with their instructions. Within a day a video response shot on those same phones to the viral “Die Antword” had been uploaded onto a video sharing site and then embedded in a blog post on their individual blog sites and shared with the world.

They had joined the revolution.

It has always bothered me that the education system focuses on teaching compliance, for 12 years at school and 3 years at college they are taught to listen, are rewarded for obedience, punished for daring to stray. It’s no wonder then that in a class of communications professionals none had a blog, they had not been told to have a blog.

I often feel that those who understand the tumultuous changes that have been brought about by the Internet are living in a parallel universe. It’s a world in which people are connected, and because of the connections the way they find stuff out, the way thye buy, the way they communicate the way they get things done has changed completely, in this world everything is possible and things happen at the speed of light.

Living right alongside us are people who don’t understand the extent to which South African’s are connected whether they live in Diepsloot or Dainfern. Who don’t understand that the development of the mobile Internet is happening eight times faster than the equivalent stage in the development of PC Internet. There are those that don’t even know about the millions and millions of messages a minute travelling along mobile based IM channels in South Africa nor the imminent availability of fast and cheap internet connections and how much influence that will have.

Many of these people are in influential positions spending advertising and marketing budgets. When the penny drops will we find that as brand marketers we don’t have the ability to connect with our customers who are finding their own voice, that our marketing communications agencies you have been following the same formulae approach to producing campaigns are lost.

Pablo Picasso said “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”

We are going to need artists in this new world. Where are we going to find them?

Certainly not out of an education system that rewards compliance.

Photo: Cobalt123

Internet causing newspaper blindness!

The newspaper industry is in denial. It is myopic.

When I read the comments of newspaper man Rupert Murdoch and read the reports on the recent keynote speech by Mark Cuban in which he called Google a vampire that must be vanquished I cant help be reminded by the management thinker Theodore Levitt and his great HBR article Marketing Myopia which although written in the sixties has perfect applicability here. The death of newspapers is not the death of news, its just the death of news on paper.

Levitt was one of the founders of marketing as a concept and the key thesis of this article is that businesses and industries fail not because of a failure of the market but because of the failure of management. Management typically puts its own needs ahead of the needs of its customers, who because their needs are not being met move on and before long the industry is in decline, being replaced by another.

The classic is the story the demise of buggy whip manufacturers, who knows what would have happened if they had seen themselves in the transportation business.

Newspapers are dying not because people don’t want to read, because they don’t want news. Newspapers and book publishing are dying because there are better and lower cost ways of reading than ink on dead trees. In fact people are reading more and more, the massive growth of the Internet has actually translated into the fact that people are writing and reading more than they ever have – and its now much easier and cheaper to get the stuff to read.

If newspapers rethought their business and realised that they are not in the news on paper business but are in the news analysis business, or the news spreading business, or the entertainment business or the information business, they would see opportunity not problems.

The appropriate action is not to try to defend, because the forces are too big and inevitably the garrison will be overrun – the choice is to understand exactly what value you are bringing to customers and focus on that.

To borrow a thought from Seth Godin the art is not in the artifact, music is not vinyl or plastic so too is journalism and news not paper. The demise of newspapers will not bring an end to journalist – with more people reading I suspect the opposite.

NO we are not looking at the end of news, we are looking at less control in the news, cheaper news, more and wider analysis of the news, more people getting the news – we are looking at the golden era of news, of  journalism, of writing and of publishing.

. . . and of forests.

Photo Credit Greything

My photo in Seth Godin’s book – Linchpin.

See if you can find me in this photo – Its the inside front cover of Seth Godin’s new book “linchpin” its kind of in the centre right, at 2 o clock from the black square.

I can’t wait to read the book, my copy is on its way from amazon.

And its really cool to be in this picture.

Telling the truth – a killer strategy?

In the US Domino’s Pizza has come under a lot of flak for their new marketing strategy.

For admitting that their product sucks, that the pizza base tastes like cardboard and saying sorry and then as a response to what their customers said developing and launching a new recipe. Crazy stuff Dominos, say the critics, you are alienating your loyal customers who presumably love cardboard and you are damaging your brand.

You can read the criticism on eConsultancy and Advertising Age by clicking on the links. While you are there read the comments. and when I tweeted the article today almost all the responses were the same, surprisingly disagreeing with the criticism.

Traditionally you would have either defended the product and shored up the brand or launched the new recipe with a “you always loved the old pizza but we have made it better”type of line.

But actually in today’s market that’s a very risky strategy.

• Domino’s customers all know the Pizza sucks, they buy it for convenient fast delivery.
• Their friends all know it too.
• They are connected to their friends.
• If you lie they will tell their friends that you are a liar.

So this is what domino’s did:

Now’s time for another story. In the late 80′s I was Client Services and Strategy Director for one of the hottest agencies in South Africa. One of clients was the biggest wine and spirits distributor. They had a dog of a wine brand, it had been promoted on the basis of its heritage – it was named after the birthplace of man who had opened a refreshment station at what is now Cape Town for ships bound from Europe to the East Indies in the spice trade.

Only one of the products was doing anything, a sweet wine loved by drunks in the Eastern Cape.

The heritage positioning was so thin that I suggested that we should throw it out and call it what it was “a good everyday drinking wine” the kind of stuff you would drink with your friends, people whom you had no need to impress.

Much to the horror of the Brand Manager but with the support of the senior management, who had decided to give the brand one last shot. So we told the truth about the brand and implemented that positioning, won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and saved the brand.

The foundation of good marketing is not just great advertising its great product and great experiences. What’s the point of trying to tell your customers stuff they already know is bull. Why not show them a little respect, show them that you care, maybe they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe this campaign will get customers to have a fresh look.

Well done Domino’s – Telling the truth may just be the Killer Strategy.

Photo by cafemama on Flickr

The Digital Divide – Huh?

The notion that there is a divide between digital marketing and traditional marketing based on whether the technology used is analogue or digital is really a little ridiculous.

This thought was all sparked by a conversation I had with a prominent industry person yesterday. We were talking about the state of digital and traditional marketing in South Africa. During that entire conversation I felt that we were on different planets, as though our point of departure was entirely different. I concluded that I must be  communicating badly and when I thought about it I realized a reason.

The marketing, adverting and for that matter digital industry often think of digital as a medium. That your job is to have a smart idea that you push onto the customer and you use the media they use because then they will see it. This allows traditional ad agencies to think that because they have a digital or interactive section they are in the game. That digital is a channel. This is where the thinking is flawed.

Marketing needs to change because the way people find things out, how they learn, how they connect and so how ideas spread has changed. Its a fundamental behavioural change.

People are still people and brands are still brands, but neither behave the way they once did.

If you use new channels in the same way that you used old channels then the new channels wont work, they wont just work because they are digital You can rethink the way you use the traditional channels – so that they do work.

The divide is not between digital and traditional, or new media and old or anything like that. The divide is between those who cant understand the changing consumers and those who can. Its not a debate between media types its a debate about how ideas spread.

(2010) The year the penny drops?

The traditional marketing industry is based on two key assumptions. Consumers are ignorant and believe what they are told. Without this advertising can’t work nearly, not nearly, as well. Yet we have seen internationally that both those assumptions have proven to be false. 2010 could well be the year the penny drops, but probably not completely.

The assumption was once true: consumers were ignorant – they got their information from the company, from salesmen from advertising. Customers also used to believe what they were told; they trusted advertising – business controlled the brand message.

Not only does research around the world show that trust in advertising has declined but we also know that through the Internet and by their own connections, customers have access to an unbelievable mountain of information, opinions and comments. Just these facts have changed marketing forever. It’s with this backdrop that I make my predictions for 2010.

1. Someone will notice that, in spite of conventional wisdom, South Africans are connected. I mean, more than 30% of us access social sites on our cellphones alone on a daily basis. Everyone has a phone, even at the lower levels of society, with the majority capable of connecting to the Internet. But they won’t know how to use this information.

2. Marketers will be the first to cotton on. They will be influenced by their international contacts and will finally realise that the excuses of “but the majority of South Africans don’t use the Internet” and that we just don’t have the bandwidth are exactly that: excuses. With the new undersea cables coming into South Africa and Africa, bandwidth as a problem will soon be a thing of the past.

3. Local advertising agencies will be leaning back, secure in their misunderstandings but becoming slowly unsettled, as they listen to their international colleagues talking about the international media bloodbath and the need to rush to digital. They will see their international associates buy digital agencies – or even start a division of their own. BUT they won’t be the core of the business.

4. Agencies will still see digital and online as a media channel and start integrating into them more and more, not realising that the key characteristic of the Internet is that it’s a social creation. It’s about people connecting, not about the technology, or even the sites themselves.

5. Internationally, the lead will be taken by thought leaders – who realise that social media is not separate from the individual’s total life experience – making sure that digital eventually becomes the centre of the brand connection, not an adjunct.

6. From a technology point of view, manufacturers will be accelerating their efforts to make sure that connection to the Internet is ubiquitous and cheap. At the high end, Apple’s iPhone is already carrying more web data than any other mobile device; but there are netbooks, tablets, the Android phone and the soon-to-be announced Apple iSlate all making sure that, more and more, the web experience is accessible and separate from the technology.

7. The way people are finding stuff on the Internet is changing; this may start having an effect on traditional digital marketing. The filter that most users will place on getting the data they want will be their friends. SEO optimisation techniques will be under huge pressure from new search algorithms and as “friend” filters and real-time search guide web users.

8. There will be a lot of flapping in media circles as traditional media morphs. The resistance movement led by the News Corp relics will continue to resist and will become increasingly irrelevant. Media entrepreneurs led by the former journalist will reinvent the way the news is spread and the financial models related to that.

9. With every major change in society, new players will emerge, new approaches will take form and the cards in the pack will be reshuffled. I believe that we will see the first major signs of that in South Africa in 2010.

Marketing will change because consumers have changed. Consumers are no longer ignorant, whether they are 25 or 52 and living in Diepsloot or Dainfern; they have unprecedented access to information, they are buying online and are part of massive electronic networks.

Maybe the penny will drop, maybe it won’t. Then next year’s predictions will be to guess how big the splash will be as the dinosaurs fall into the marketing tar pit and their new competitors, more nimble, like mammals, create a new marketing ecosystem.

This post first appeared in Bizcommunity trends report.

Picture by The invizible on flickr

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Who is fit to lead your brand?

Its a question worth asking and the subject of my chat on the Internet economy on Friday, January 15, 2010.

Brand stewardship/ custodianship has traditionally been a space that has been claimed by the advertising agency, althjough we are seldom in a conversation in digital circles that we don’t hear the view that the “agencies just don’t get it”  so if they dont who does. Are the digital agencies ready to lead the brand?

My fellow “The Beancast” panel member Ana Adejelic wrote about this in Advertising Age and was ridiculed by both agency and digital groups. In her view digital are in exploratory mode and ad agencies focused on exploiting a tried and tested approach, in essence this means digital will shoot the lights out but generally cant be trusted with the whole brand, whereas the ad agency are so locked replicating a “safe” formula that they have forgotten whats good for the brand.

Traditional agencies and marketers are stuck in a marketing model which is hopelessly out of date, it is based on the idea that homogeneous groups of consumers exist which are called target markets, and that loyalty can be built in these groups by repeatedly interrupting them with brand messages until they listen and when they do they will believe what they see and read.

Digital agencies are often built around the concept of search engine marketing and the techniques of SEO. They drive the “direct marketing” concepts of measurability and conversions, turning interaction into sales.

Is either of them right?

The Internet has been alive for years with the view that Advertising is dead, and more and more we are hearing the view that SEO is dead. In the words of Mark Twain in both cases “The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated” although in both these cases there is a whole lot of truth tied up in those reports.

Lets propose a different set of views:

• The Internet is essentially a social creation.
• The Internet is not another marketing medium as little as a discussion around the braai (BBQ) is a marketing medium.
• The internet is not only about analytics and conversions – about OBSERVATION, it needs also to about a UNDERSTANDING of how people behave.
• The real strength of the Internet is that it connects people.
• Brands are created by the experience that customers have.
• Because of the network of connections ideas (good and bad) can spread faster than ever was possible before.
• There is too much information around and customers have too little time.
• People don’t believe advertising, they are starting to not even search in the way they did. They ask their friends. (Real time search)
• If it’s important,information will find me.
• The power in the transaction has shifted, brands are no longer the only source of information.

These thoughts fundamentally change the way we think about brands, branding and marketing.

New marketing is essentially understanding that the game has changed, that the connection created by the internet, however it is accessed, by computer or mobile phone has fundamentally changed the way that society operates in a way that will never be rolled back. Because brands no longer have control of the information that customers can access. Brands will be built in new and different ways. They will use all the traditional tools but in a totally different way. Brands will be built by experiences and interactions.

Modern marketing was only invented in the 60s to understand the use of the most important communications tools of the era. The character of the new tools are fundamentally different. Although paradoxically when we read the early ad men it seems they got it.

Marketing has always been about making stuff and creating experiences that people want, making it available to them and getting them to talk about it. Branding in the final analysis is what people believe about stuff, what they talk about.

Ad agencies don’t get it and will never get it because the agency model and the way they work does not fit the social interaction model; agencies were invented to solve a different problem and to use one way communications channels. The new boys, digital agencies will battle as the Internet becomes more and more a way to connect ideas and people and less like a catalogue, a searchable database and so the role of the search engine changes dramatically.

Brands are built around storytelling, there is a legend that surrounds every brand, that story was being told by brands about themselves, now the story is being told by customers, about their experiences. Customers who have the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere, now have the capacity to share and collaborate on a scale never before thought possible, to share and spread ideas and stories around the world almost instantaneously.

Although the fundamentals of marketing have not changed, because customers have the approach also needs to. Brands are still important and marketing now becomes more than just a box on the organogram, it becomes the entire business as seen from the point of view of the customer who don’t care where they interact with the brand as its all part of the same experience, an experience they tell their friends about.

The story that becomes the brand.

I see a totally new type of agency, one that understands the new customer that will guide its clients through the process of building the customers total experience and of engagement. An agency that has a fundamental understanding of how people buy, of all the communications channels and how to use them not to attempt to overpower customers into brand loyalty but assist them to spread the idea. The idea that is the brand.

This is part of the vision behind PiKE | The New Marketing Agency

Listen to what we spoke about Podcast Link Here

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  Walter Pike is the founder and leader of
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