The Grass Grows Greener

Brand Strategy talked to Cohn & Wolfe PR and Landor Associates today about their combined 2008 Green Brands Report. Both Ian Wood of Landor and Geoff Beattie of Cohn & Wolfe argue green will become a major purchase driver going forward and unpack some of the complexities of that.

The themes they both outlined as being most interesting from the report are:

• In  the general sense of how people feel about the environment, the majority of people feel that things are getting worse regarding the.

• The change between the 2007 study the agencies did and the 2008 study is interesting. Climate change used to be the most important issue for consumers: Today it comes out as a combination of the issues of energy; global warming; water; transportation and, at the highest ranking, waste.

• Now when people think about who is responsible for these kind of problems it used to be overwhelmingly private enterprise but now the highest rated group is individuals so the issue is becoming more personal with people seeing themselves as part of the problem and the solution.

• In terms of who consumers think should  be dealing with the problems of the environment, people are still looking to the government to provide the broad guidelines and policies.

•  People believe companies should be conserving resources and producing environmentally friendly products. This is an area which is immediate and touchable and where people believe they can make a difference.

•  Green awareness hits some categories faster than others. Supermarkets are up at the beginning of the list whereas mobile phones are further down. It seems many consumers are not aware of the issues around the manufacture and disposal of those mobile phone products.

•  Companies which appear to support green issues from the top of the business have greater brand awareness around their green policies e.g Marks and Spencers  which is number two in a list of 20 “Green Power Brands”. The company is also perceived as having the most momentum in terms of getting greener in the past two years.

•  50 percent of consumers say they are going to be purchasing more products that are more green orientated going forward. The question leading on from that is whether consumers are going to be buying green offerings from traditional brands or products from green brands.

The shift to green is going to hit different countries and categories at different times. They predict that it is likely to become the DNA of organisations so that it becomes the norm. Ultimately it is uniqueness that tends to build powerful brands and when everybody does green it ceases to be unique.

The win win combination, they suggest, is for a brand to stress heavily the efficacy of, for example, a cleaning product and have green as a secondary advantage.

Read our case study on green cleaning brand Ecover in the July/August issue of Brand Strategy.

Music and beer – they go together

San Miguel is bringing its Hidden Depths series of music and media events back for a second year, giving festival dwellers a new way to enjoy the wonders of booze and music.

Let’s face it, with a couple of beers under your belt, anything sounds and looks good. This is universally acknowledged and the term we now use for it is “beer goggles”. But just how far will brands go to create this summer experiences and does it really promote what the brands are all about?

The concept and campaign for Hidden Depths is focused around young urban people who like to discover new things and look beyond the obvious.

The San Miguel event aims to challenge consumers to look that little bit deeper as they are given a rare insight into the musical and visual inspirations of some of the UK’s most intriguing artists. But you can’t help but wonder – what does this have to do with San Miguel (a south east Asian beer brand)?

San Miguel Brand Manager, Elena Iborra, said: “Aimed at people who like to look a little bit further, San Miguel Hidden Depths is a series of unique collaborations between San Miguel and the guests invited to curate.”

“By creating unique partnerships with the artists, we can gain their direct endorsement for Hidden Depths, which acts as a powerful communication tool. Social currency is key for this audience, so the marketing campaign aims to get consumers to spread the word on San Miguel’s behalf.”Maybe sometimes beer is just beer and music is just music.

Supermarket designer bag hits the shelves – again

Cath Kidston has designed a range of reusable eco-friendly bags that are only available in Tesco supermarkets from July. The bags are made entirely of recycled plastic bottles with the money raised through sales going to charity Marie Curie Cancer Care.

The bags are limited edition so they’re being touted as a highly sought after fashion item. Although Tesco is playing it cool and not planning to open up early on the day the bags hit the shops, Brand Strategy is guessing that both designer and supermarket will be hoping for queues of frantic women hoping to get a piece of Kidston for £3.50.

This follows the Anya Hindmarch ‘I’m Not A Plastic Bag’ which was sold in Sainsbury’s last year. People queued for hours to get one of the designer bags up for grabs, and hours later they were reportedly being traded on eBay for up to £200. With only 20,000 on sale the bag certainly caused lots of publicity although there were question marks about its environmental messaging as it was shipped in from China. We couldn’t establish where the Cath Kidston bags are being made, but the company has a sustainability policy which it is keen to promote.

The ‘I’m Not a Plastic bag’ raised the designer’s profile among the masses and made it a fashion statement to walk down the street with a reusable bag. There will be 750,000 Cath Kidston bags on sale, in six different prints. We shall keep an eye on the high street to see if this item becomes a must have style statement. The bag pictured below looks far more attractive than the usual supermarket ‘bags for life’. As the bag is going to be available in larger quantities and for a longer period than the Hindmarch design, perhaps there will be no fights at the entrance of Tesco next week, and more of an orderly queue.

Everybody is talking about me: the annual brands in social media list

A new report reveals that Google and its rival Yahoo (or is it now ‘ad partner’?) are the most talked about brands in social media.

The annual Brands in Social Media report [link to report if possible] , from Immediate Future, examines the conversations around top 100 brands in blogs, forums and social networks.

The report, now in its second year, studies consumer conversations, reviews, comments and mentions; it reveals how the presence of the biggest global brands is increasing across social media including social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

The top three most-talked-about brands online are Google, Yahoo! and Apple, closely followed by entertainment companies such as MTV and Disney.

This year, Microsoft dropped to the ninth spot from its position last year at number four, as did Canon, which is this year ranked in tenth place, dropping from the fifth spot last year.

One of the most-chattered-about marques in the report is Ford, which enjoys six brands featuring in the Top 25.

But what does this report say about these brands? What can we find out from this research?

Last year Facebook launched an advertising platform, Beacon, in which it encouraged people to talk and link to brand they liked. Unfortunately the idea backfired as many Facebook users found it to be intrusive.

But the idea was there. Facebook was clearly looking to make money, and like most dotcoms, the ad world was the first logical place to look. So how can brands encourage consumers to talk about them?

You have may have noticed that Yahoo and Google are probably the most talked about brands in consumer and trade press media as well as social media. The two names have accumulated millions of column inches over the past year and have set themselves in the minds of the people who use them – which we can safely assume is everybody?

Other talked about brands, such Apple, have become popular due to hype over its groundbreaking products – the iPhone and the iPod.

Disney’s reason for being in the top ten most-talked-about brands is probably something to do with the success of High School Musical and Nintendo’s would have to be down to the Wii.

The point is: the reason these brands have made it so highly up in the list is because they have remained current, modern and innovative, continuously attracting the press and expanding the imaginations of their customers.

Brands also cause a stir in the blogs by acting controversially. Take, for example, the recent Heinz ad, which the soup and baked bean maker had pulled this morning after more than 200 complaints.

There is not a trade marketing magazine, website or national newspaper, that hasn’t covered that story, which has also attracted thousands of blog posts, becoming, perhaps today’s (25 June) most-talked-about brand.

So how do you make it into the top ten most-talked-about brands? Keep your brand current and up-to-date. And, of course, hope that people are saying nice things about you.

Bad bridal branding? Caroline Castigliano introduces fees for trying on wedding dresses

We at Brand Strategy were very intrigued to see this report about how some wedding dress brands and retailers have started charging brides to try on their products. Yes, that’s right….with the average cost of a wedding in the UK hitting £20,000 and dresses costing anything up to £5,000 for even non-celebrity wedding gowns, these brands have introduced a charge to stop women who aren’t really getting married from testing them out.

Caroline Castigliano in London has introduced a £25 charge for brides wanting to try on dresses on Saturdays or in the evening. The fee is returned if people buy a dress. Other brands are doing the same thing.

Now, we spot a number of problems for brand owners with this strategy:

1. The women who are trying on dresses are all potential future customers. Even if they are not getting married now, the experience they have with your brand will affect what they choose in future. If you’re risking offending your future customers by charging them to try on your stock, you may find that you don’t have any future customers left.

2. Keeping your products elite is all very well but that should be done with the price-tag of the garment. Would you expect to pay to try on the even more expensive dresses in Prada or Gucci? No, because it is the retailer’s job to let you try out things if you’re about to spend a lot of money on them.

3. It tarnishes the brand by painting the retailer or dress manufacturer involved as being more interested in money than the bride. Asking for cash to try on clothes suggests that the brand considers its clothes to be more important than the customer. When modern retailing is all about creating a fantastic customer experience, this is really a step backwards.

4. In a credit crunch environment, where people are more concerned about their spending, this type of initiative looks like cashing in on the fuss, hype and cost surrounding the modern wedding. Women who may not yet have decided which brands they like are unlikely to want to pay hundreds of pounds to visit a few different shops, especially when shops tend to specialise in only a few brands each.

What do you think? Let us know! A fair tax for timewasters or a brand strategy blip?

Big-Breasted Brother – fantasy versus reality

Just when you thought reality television had reached its peak and couldn’t possible come up with anything more to retain viewers, Big Brother does something to surprise us all…it recruits Pamela Anderson.

Former Baywatch babe and Playboy bunny Pamela Anderson will bust into the Australian Big Brother house next month.

The Canadian-born actress and sex symbol, who turns 41 next week, will take a break from filming her own reality series to appear on the Australian version of the show. Is this purely for publicity or is Pammy a reality?

The news comes as Channel 4’s latest series of the reality show, the ninth series in the UK, recorded record viewing numbers on Friday night with 4.72 million viewers tuning in to the eviction show.

McFly, McDonald’s and the Mail….

Boyband McFly has signed a deal to distribute its new album free with newspaper The Mail on Sunday on 20th July this year. The group wants to reach a potential three million customers before giving the album a conventional CD release in September from its own label, Super Records.

The news comes shortly after it was revealed that McFly would be working with fast-food giant McDonald’s in a partnership that will also see Girls Aloud and Sugababes lending their music to the retailer and performing in-store. The deal between the boyband and McDonald’s has been put together by Ric Salmon, a former EMI executive who heads up brand entertainment agency Harvest. Salmon revealed that there was a possibility for a longer-term deal involving McFly and McDonald’s if the initial partnership was successful.

Google bigger than Microsoft? Harris reputation study says yes….

Google has been voted the highest ranking internet company by the 2007 Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient study with 69% of consumers saying they trust the brand.

The internet search engine giant has beaten Microsoft for the third spot, it came in at number ten, behind Johnson & Johnson and the United Parcel Service.

Google’s victory shows that a company that spends nothing on advertising can still be the most positively perceived by consumers.

The report said: “The positive perception of how you treat your employees, your corporate-social-responsibility efforts, and your products and services and the amount of media that can generate probably trumps any ad spend Google would ever want to make.”

That’s not to say big business in general came out well in the study: 71% of consumers said the reputation of corporate America is either “not good” or “terrible.”

Heinz: Driving the pink pound away?

A new ad from Heinz, the first from its newly appointed advertising agency AMV BBDO, has received more than 150 complaints for showing two men kissing – is this just a case of ad land staying ahead of the market, or a tribute to modern times?

The complaints come as California allows gay and lesbian couples to legally marry and Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and his partner Kevin McGee announce their divorce.

It’s been a busy month in the land of the pink pound and soon enough the term “gay marriage” won’t be making international headlines. So why does this way of life still cause so much controversy?

What does Brand Australia stand for in 2008?

The land down under has been officially named the fattest nation, even ahead of the notoriously junk food loving United States, so what’s gone wrong in one of the world’s youngest countries?

The latest comprehensive obesity study has shown that 26% of adult Australians – almost four million – are now obese, one million more than the last calculation in 1999.

Australia has a distinct advantage over the world by being only just over 200 years old – it has learnt from the mistakes of others in some areas. However, it seems now that the country has been sucked in by the convenience of fast food, cheese in a can and cable TV.

Admittedly, Australia has been slightly behind the rest of world in terms of all things luxury and technological. A big country it is, but it’s also a simple one that has always been famed for its outdoorsy lifestyle, constant sun and heat and topless bikini babes.

So what has happened in the past ten years that has seen it become ‘the next America’ and full of fatties?