When Brands Go Wrong

For many years, I was the delighted driver of Toyota's achingly brilliant MR2, first the 'ordinary' one then the leather-seated T-Bar. A glorious car that, sadly, would never take off in France, because pronounced in French it translates to emmerdeu or pain in the arse. Rolls Royce narrowly avoided naming one of its models Silver Mist after someone pointed out that mist is German for dung although this didn't stop Clairol, which actually brought its 'Mist Stick' curling iron to market there. Mitsubishi's Pajero is, as eny ful no, called a Shogun in the UK and a Montero in other European and US & South American markets. That's because pajero in Spanish means onanist. And Ford rather blew it when it took its Pinto into the Brazilian market, where in the local argot pinto refers to an under-endowed gentleman.

Kia's sporty concept for a car named Provo, caused an outburst of offended reaction in Northern Ireland where it is slang for Provisional IRA. Who was to know?

I love these stories and can never get enough of them: the marketing disasters of idiotic nomenclature amuse me greatly. This is because, as anyone who's read this blog knows, I am a child.

The sustained train crash of Vegemite's attempted launch of a new product a few years back tickled me from the get-go and was a gift that kept on giving, from the opening salvo right the way through to the inevitable derailing and appalling subsequent tumble down the embankment and into the oil storage depot where a guard was smoking.

We start with the fact that Vegemite is itself a poor and pallid parody of the King of Dark Salty Spreads, Marmite. Vegemite came up with a new product, an insane experiment in wrongness which makes cheesy peas seem attractive, and proposed launching a jar stuffed with a blend of Vegemite with cream cheese. The company, in a move which should have served as a history lesson for the British Natural Environment Research Council in the same way Hitler would have profited from a quick review of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, asked the public to suggest a product name.

And there it would have ended if they hadn't chosen, from the 50,000-odd suggestions, 'iSnack 2.0'. The bloke that made the suggestion noted it was a tongue in cheek effort, but that escaped the drooling idiots at Vegemite brand owner, Kraft Foods. The company's head of corporate affairs defended the name: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0 was chosen based on its personal call to action, relevance to snacking and clear identification of a new and different Vegemite to the original."

I kid you not. Even Hitler himself jumped on the bandwagon.

It's apparently now called 'Cheesybite' which is, IMHO, not a great deal better.

The daddy of them all, the fact that Coca Cola was originally dubbed 'Bite the wax tadpole' in Chinese is, sadly, not due to an outbreak of idiocy at Coke marketing central but was the result of over-eager merchants daubing signs advertising the new wonder drink in the 1920s.

Which is really something of a shame...

Mind you, the geniuses at Pepsi didn't need a new product name to make a mess of things, did they?

Android and KitKat. Genius.

KitKat (Photo credit: Nestlé)

As eny fule no, Google is prone to various fits of whimsy and one of these is naming releases of its Android operating system after tasty treats. After Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean we were to have enjoyed Key Lime Pie, but the team of really cool and crazy guys at Google decided that few people would know what they were on about.

So they decided on KitKat as the name for Android 4.4. It was, Google's John Lagerling told the BBC, because they snacked on KitKats during late night coding sessions. The story's linked here and well worth reading - it tells of how Google put a cold call into Nestlé's London ad agency and how Nestlé 'got it' within 24 hours. The agreement to let this all go ahead was one which is, according to Lagerling, "not a money-changing-hands kind of deal."

Which is pretty stupendous. If you pop over to the KitKat website, you'll find they've made the most of the opportunity. It's all very well done and highly amusing, even to people who enjoy late night coding sessions, extolling the virtues of KitKat 4.4 with features such as portrait and landscape orientation, 'diamond sharp bevels' and unlimited standby time.

The Beeb and other news outlets have done a great job reaching out to 'brand consultancies' and 'marketing experts' to talk about the downside of the deal - how if KitKat has a huge product recall or Google's new Android is crap it'll affect the other brand. I think that's utter tosh - there are no downsides. Today's consumer is smart enough to know what's going on and I'm not about to uninstall my Nexus because a chocolate bar has gone wrong or, indeed, eschew KitKats because my latest install of Android sucks.

I'm afraid the naysayers are lone voices in the wilderness - this deal is brilliant at every level and Nestlé has to be applauded for not only seeing the potential with blinding speed, but getting the zeitgeist pretty much spot on. That's by no means a 'given' with marketing departments and agencies - anyone remember Vegemite's disastrous attempt to rename itself as "iSnack 2.0"?

And the fact that no cash has changed hands is very, well, Google, isn' t it?

Hotel Chocolat And Brand Positioning Online

Hotel Chocolat, Kensington, W8 (Photo credit: Ewan-M)

We were talking positioning brands online the other day on the Business Breakfast – it's linked here if you fancy a listen in - about the changes in the rules that taking an ‘offline’ brand to the Web entail. As part of that chat, we looked at some brands that had moved the other way – digital brands that have made their way onto the high street. One of the more high profile successes at this has been Hotel Chocolat.

I am, and always have been, a huge fan of this company. Started by founder Angus Thirlwell and co-founder Peter Harris as a business selling mints in 1988, by 2003 the company had become known as ChocExpress, a catalogue-based mail order business (with a website) that included a chocolate tasting club – a concept that was to be core to Hotel Chocolat and a club that today has over 100,000 members.

The trouble was that ChocExpress didn’t reflect the luxurious image that Thirlwell was after for his premium chocolates. And it was that dissatisfaction that led to the product I first encountered in my mum’s living room many years back. It was a luxuriantly packed box of chocolates, more like a hat box than a chocolate box, with a ‘Hotel Chocolat’ room card-key and a ‘do no disturb’ sign to hang on the door while you had your one-one experience with that box of very fine chocolates indeed. The chocolates had individual recipes, lavish descriptions and a little card for you to take tasting notes and send them back to Hotel Chocolat.

Here was an online business with a two-way customer communication mechanism built into its very DNA long before everyone had started talking social media.

The brand, and its promise, was incredibly strong. It was unique, clearly differentiated and communicated throughout the product offering – and the website which took over from the catalogue as the premier conduit for reaching customers. Although Hotel Chocolat was quick to open high street stores, it has been the Internet business that has driven the incredible success of the company which now employs over 800 people and has a real Hotel Chocolat in the Caribbean and its own cocoa plantation to boot. The company has launched a range of sub-brands, including boutique cocoa outlet Roast+Conch and Cocoa Juvenate, a range of cocoa-themed beauty products. There are over 70 stores in the UK’s high streets, five in the US and three in the Middle East. You can nip down to Mall of the Emirates if you fancy a chocolate rush par excellence - the only shame is that Hotel Chocolat's boozy chocolates don't get a look in. Because they, my dears, are very good indeed.

And that website’s still there, reflecting that brand positioning as strongly today as it did almost ten years back when I opened a posh-looking box of chocolates in my mum’s living room and was transfixed by the painfully smart marketing that met my eyes just before I lifted the paper covering to reveal the rows of little shinies underneath.

You know, I might be lying about the positioning. It might just be all about the chocolate after all…

Viral and Virality

virus (Photo credit: twenty_questions)

It has been quite a week for things viral around here - I posted the other day about Gerald Donovan's amazing interactive 360 degree Burj Khalifa panorama of Dubai and my professional involvement with the campaign to get it 'out there'.

Like many of my colleagues, I have always had contempt for ad agency people who announce they are setting out to create 'viral content' because they are almost certainly doomed to failure. The harder you try to create something with that quality, the more likely you are to find yourself naked in a crowded square holding something dead in your hand with small children jeering at you. In a cold wind.

There are also some burning questions inherent in the use of the term. How many/how fast is 'viral'? What makes viral things viral? What is the 'quality' of viral? The answer to the latter is 'Nobody knows' - a cat falling off a desk, Justin Beiber, Gerald's pano - these are all different types of viral. You can set out to create a piece of content that people will really, really want to share and watch it die the death of the neglected, while at the same time a puppy being scared by a hoover being switched on spreads across the Internet like nightshade falling across the earth in a one minute motion-capture. It's almost unguessable.

One man who knows more than most about how to create great, engaging content is Matthew Inman. He's the chap behind that most humorous of websites, The Oatmeal. His presentation on going viral, given at South by Southwest two years ago makes impressive watching. It contains learnings and is very, very funny. Which is as good as you can get, really. The whole thing's an hour, but you can drop the Q&A and not miss much, to be honest. It's linked here for your viewing pleasure.

You'll perhaps note that The Oatmeal doesn't really set out to be 'viral' as such, but Inman does create a constant flow of solid, amusing and shareable content. He has a wide (millions) viewership and enormous followings on Twitter and Facebook, both platforms he uses to extend the reach of The Oatmeal and draw readers to the content he's posting on The Oatmeal itself. Although he doesn't use, or need, the likes of Reddit anymore, he used them heavily to establish the site, participating in those communities to seed content among aggressive sharers by being one of them.

But his stuff wouldn't have got anywhere if it hadn't been distinctive, unusual and highly entertaining - shareable and willingly adopted (at least initially) by those communities of sharers.

If you have amazing content and a strong, well-implemented strategy you can improve your chances, but it's still pretty hit and miss. Even I, as stunning as I find Mr. D's work (and I have watched his images 'go viral' in the past - he does seem to have a 'nose' for it), had a wobble or two early this week.

If you're building a property online (A website, a campaign or a brand), there's no substitute for building audiences and communities organically. And that means not one flash in the pan event, but a constant flow of high quality, relevant, engaging content. It's a long road - but there's no panacea. Whatever the guy with the ponytail from the agency claims he can do with 'a viral'...

RIM Enables Etisalat Update Removal

Image via CrunchBase

"Recently an update may have been provided to you by Etisalat for your BlackBerry Handheld via a WAP push. The Etisalat update is not a RIM-authorized update and was not developed by RIM. Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server. RIM has developed this software (“Software”) that will enable you to remove the Etisalat update."

Not my words, but the official words of the company that makes and enables BlackBerry handheld devices , RIM, on its own forum.

Particularly chilling are these words: "Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server."

This directly contradicts the words of telco Etisalat, which made a formal statement to media last week, "These upgrades were required for service enhancements particularly for issues identified related to the handover between 2G to 3G network coverage areas."

But RIM goes a lot, lot further in its formal statement on the whole affair. In fact, the company says:

"RIM confirms that this software is not a patch and it is not a RIM authorized upgrade. RIM did not develop this software application and RIM was not involved in any way in the testing, promotion or distribution of this software application.

RIM further confirms, in general terms, that a third party patch cannot provide any enhancements to network services as there is no capability for third parties to develop or modify the low level radio communications protocols that would be involved in making such improvements to the communications between a BlackBerry smartphone and a carrier’s network.

In addition, RIM is not aware of any technical network concerns with the performance of BlackBerry smartphones on Etisalat’s network in the UAE."

So someone's been telling porkie pies, haven't they?

The link to BlackBerry's site is HERE and if you have a BlackBerry and implemented the update, you'll be relieved to know it contains a removal tool provided by RIM for its customers to use in getting rid of the performance-sapping software.

RIM has done the right thing - in contrast to security company SS8, the organisation presumed to have actually coded the software behind this awful little mess and which has maintained a total silence in the face of media requests. Similarly, etisalat's reaction (ignore it all and hope it goes away) has hardly been customer focused - people are still helping each other with 'broken' BlackBerries and Twitter is still ringing with plaintive Tweets for help from grounded BB users.

Do get the word out to friends and family that an 'official' fix is now available to roll back the update and, belatedly, ameliorate the impact on users of this muckle-headed catastrophe.

Etisalat still has 145,000 people to answer to, BTW... And, one rather suspects, a media that will be baying for its blood...

Link to the RIM statement, hosted on the Chirashi Security blog, HERE. Enjoy!

Currency

The UAE’s unit of currency is the Dirham. A dirham is divided into 100 fils and there are coins for 50 fils and 25 fils. Much less common, but still sometimes to be found in circulation, there are little brown coins worth 5 and 10 fils respectively. Much more prevalent, and valued at anything up to 50 fils, although 25 is more reasonable, is the Chiclet.

The UAE central bank has never really recognised the Chiclet, but then no other Middle East central bank has – and it’s a recognised unit of currency throughout the Arab World. Wherever you go in the region, a lack of small change in any shop is met with a Chiclet. A boiled sweet or small pack of Wrigley’s gum is acceptable if the shop doesn’t, for some strange reason, have a sufficient stock of two-piece packs of Chiclets.

Nobody ever buys Chiclets. They get given them as change. And, oddly enough, they're the Middle East's market leading gum - they're actually made in Lebanon.

It’s probably the strangest product success story of 'em all...

Stoned

Remember the pointless promotional stone that computer company Acer sent to thousands of disinterested Gulf News readers way back at the beginning of summer last year? The one attached to the blob of ad-babble (‘Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy...’) that was rather pathetically promoting the Acer Gemstone laptop?

I had a desk clearout yesterday and found the blasted thing, lurking behind a pencil pot.

Obviously my bid to swap it for the moon á la One Red Paperclip has not really worked very well as evidenced by the fact that I don’t own the moon and I still have a small, smooth and black stone with a flaw in it lurking on my desk at work.

As some may recall, I tried giving it away to colleagues but no-one would take it. And I can’t really just throw it away after all this time: I feel the need to get some sort of value out of it.

But what? What on earth can you do with a piece of promotional stone?

Marmite

Marmite has produced a limited edition of 300,000 jars made using Guinness yeast. It tastes very nice indeed. Mildly curious as to how they make the stuff, after a lifetime eating it, I wandered onto the website. Because that's what the Internet is for.

Rarely has a site impressed me so much initially and then driven me so surely to rage. It's BLOODY annoying. There's no information there. Nothing. You can learn more about Marmite from Wikipedia. Which is a worry in itself.

The idea's smart. You either love Marmite or hate it, is the thinking - hence the whole themed campaign that Unilever (what, did you think it was home made or something?) has undertaken around the love it/hate it theme. So you have a site that's divided into love heaven and hate hell. Cool. Except that the concept is taken to its idiot extreme by a group of pony-tailed tossers who write 'copy for the kids' like this:

"Eat Marmite? You don't just want to eat it, you want to bathe in it, wallow in it like a hippo in mud, slather yourself from head to toe and wrap yourself in bread and butter... And you know what? That's fine. Just fine. Completely normal in fact..."

That's just a small taste. The site is unremittingly pointless. Here. You decide for yourself. Does going there just prove that it's a great idea? No, because it simply exposes more people to a negative and frustrating experience linked to the brand. Sure, use 'rich content' technologies to make your marketing point and even have a goof around with it to show that your brand is really hip - if you really must. But people want information from company websites before they want funky fun experiences - and if that informaton is simply not available, you're just going to tee them off...

Marmite website? Hate it.