Seven Stones: Blog Archive

Engagement is a buzzword in the industry at the moment, as if engagement is the way you reach people and persuade them in the first place. This fashionable idea is being pushed by people who know about technology but know little about brands and relationships.

But have a think about the word engagement and what it means.

In marital terms it is the exchanging of contracts between those who are in love and want to spend their lives together. Before this can happen people need to find one another attractive, meet and get to know each other.

So engagement’s what you do in an advanced state of mutual interest.

Audi does engagement brilliantly. Its website takes people who already think it’s a cool and desirable brand and helps them get to know it even better. People go there just before they buy. It’s a very powerful way of closing the sale.

But few brands have done the work that Audi has done to make an engagement strategy the right one. Many brands who’ve created no awareness, consideration or attractiveness are hiring agencies to create engagement strategies when they’d do better to get the fundamentals right first.

The Seven Stones Great Chilli Cook Off of 2011 (SSGCCO 2011 for short) kicked off this season’s kitchen challenge extravaganza. We stirred, we simmered, we ate.

Working at a creative agency, we are very well versed in the rule that the broader the brief, the broader the output. In this case, Team Coulson and Team Lopez had very different styles and recipes, as the only parameters given for the friendly were to ‘make some chilli’.  This led to two very enjoyable, but very different bowls of goodness. No good battle is without its controversy; there was debate over meat choice – rib eye versus ground beef. Spice factor also proved each chilli was similar in personality to its maker.

Given this was the first of the many friendly, pseudo-non-competitive competitions, no winner was decided.  It was, however, noted that it is possible to feed approximately 25 with two batches of chilli, eight instant rice packets and one microwave in a compact kitchen.

Dr Richard Watson, the Scotland Clinical lead for substance abuse, points out today that rehab clinics - residential rehabilitation units - have a poor record of efficacy.

Indeed, for opium dependent patients, the death rate after discharge is higher than it is when compared with opioid substitution patients, such as those receiving Methadone.

But it seems that this evidence is often ignored.

It reminds me of a fledgling picked up by a small child and put in shoe box. Left in the open, the bird's mother might have a chance of feeding it…

Sometimes the desire to intervene overwhelms good judgement and what actually works.

Imagine you had the power to rectify the mistakes that you make in life.

You could go back and un-gel your hair from those Millennium photos. You could get a refund on your Pokémon collection. You could avoid buying that flat screen TV that was nearly a yard deep that you’ve just taken to the municipal dump.

Hindsight lets us see the folly of our past.

Well, the IPA has just provided us in the communications industry with a piece of hindsight that I suspect will take years to sink in. In an analysis of business results, they have shown that campaigns encouraging participation are less effective at developing brands than those relying on more passive responses.

For the past decade the buzz in the communications industry has been massively about using digital media to get people involved in campaigns. Only last week one of the most famous of these, an anti VW viral by Greenpeace (http://www.vwdarkside.com/en) was hailed for setting new standards of influence.

But for every Greenpeace there are hundreds of campaigns that set out to get people to '“sign up/follow us/visit us at…” which don’t even make the news. The IPA research shows that these campaigns tend to reach the people already involved, but are generally ineffective at winning new friends to the brand or cause.

Rather like the direct marketing industry that’s so busy measuring the less than 1% of people who responded that they ignore the fact that they made no impression on 99% whatsoever…

Hindsight is available now. But I bet many won’t heed it. We often do what’s fashionable when we should know better.

The struggle between good and evil has inspired many a good publication: the Bible, Harry Potter, and the News of the World (NoW) in-between. And despite the forgiveness preached by the church, society tends to say: “once a villain, always a villain”. So whatever the Murdochs do, some will say they do it for all the wrong reasons.

I was talking to our resident psychology professor recently and he put it this way: “Our choices are fundamentally about two things: morality and competence. However competent someone may seem, if his morality is doubted, we won’t choose him.”

This makes it hard for any brand that’s transgressed trust. For while competence can be demonstrated, trust can only be earned. It may well be that soon we have a Sun on Sunday, and cynics will say that News International has duped us again. It may be that most of the hacks who lost their jobs also get re-hired, but to suggest that this was an easy decision and another example of manipulation gives no credit to the Murdochs at all. 

NoW is no Leyland motors. It’s the most successful newspaper in the country and closing down the brand that’s been the cornerstone of Rupert Murdoch’s empire since 1969 is a very hard thing to do, personally and professionally. I believe that’s the whole point.

Even if there is a Sun-on-Sunday it won’t recover the circulation enjoyed by NoW as the latter had a classless appeal—often bought as a pair with the Sunday Times—that’s unique in the newspaper market.

Perhaps News International is trying to atone for its collective errors.  Lord Voldemort is a fictional character who can be as evil and one-dimensional as his author intends. But the Murdochs – despite their press – are real human beings. 

In a balanced world we ought to at least open our minds to the idea that only something as big as this would demonstrate that they are in sincere in their intentions.