Hill+Knowlton Strategies

MINDSPACE (Dolan et al., 2010)

+  +  +         #2  Incentives         +  +  +

Incentives can be a powerful tool in harnessing the power of the public – engaging people and motivating behaviour change. The impact of incentives clearly depends upon factors such as type, magnitude and timing of the incentive. In a competitive economic environment brands are increasingly using incentives to attract consumers and stand out from the competition.

The power of incentive

Brands in the service industry – such as high-street banks, mobile phone network providers – are using incentives and rewards to become more attractive to consumers. However, the behavioural economic insight loss aversion is important in order to understand how best to use incentives in marketing. Loss aversion is used to explain that we dislike losses more than we like gains of the equivalent amount. What this means, for example, is human beings feel the loss of losing  £1 more than we feel the elation of being given £1. Therefore, brands that emphasise the money (or reward) that people will lose out on by not taking an action/purchasing can have a more powerful impact and motivation on people’s behaviour, rather than simply highlighting the amount they could be given if purchasing.

Brands in the fast-moving consumer goods industry consistently have to compete for consumer’s attention. Unilever’s Magnum icecream is an example of a brand currently (April 2013) using incentives as a marketing strategy to drive sales and engage consumers. The incentive Magnum is giving consumers is the chance to win a designer handbag worth £800 every day. However, now understanding loss aversion, if Magnum had framed the incentive in a way that consumers feel that they are losing out if they do not purchase, then this could have a more powerful impact on people’s behaviour to drive sales. Although, the type and magnitude of the incentive of a £800 handbag could be significant enough in itself to demand attention from some consumers. Furthermore, people have a habit of over-weighing small probabilities – for example lotteries – and so consumers may over-weigh the small chance of winning the handbag.

Magnum - win a designer handbag everyday

Another example of using incentives to engage a community is ConAgra Foods. In order to increase engagement on it’s Healthy Choice Facebook Page, users who “liked” the brand received a coupon for 75 cents off their next Healthy Choice purchase. ConAgra then coaxed more consumers to join its Facebook page by dangling a “buy one, get one free” coupon offer. In other words, the coupon’s value grew as more consumers joined the page.

However, a fundamental problem with using incentives, is that once an activity (such as buying a Magnum) is associated with external reward (chance to win a handbag), then individuals are less inclined to participate with the activity in the future without further incentives. Furthermore, and worst still, is if a brand fails to deliver on a reward/incentive – an example would be Red Bull’s VIP trip of a lifetime to the Belgium Grand Prix Competition. Red Bull was censured and criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in February 2013 after sending competition winners on a budget trip across three countries, making them share a bed and then sending them home early after they were barred from entering the race’s VIP enclosure.

Incentives - influencing behaviour and engaging consumers

In summary, incentives can be a useful tool to engage people’s behaviour – and the impact of the incentive depends upon type, magnitude and timing. People have a habit of over-weighing small probabilities, meaning competitions can be effective. Losses loom larger than gains, and so framing incentives to consumers in such a way that they feel the loss if they don’t participate can be a powerful communication and marketing tool. However, if brands become associated with external reward/incentive then consumers can be less inclined to participate in the future without these external rewards/incentives.

Follow @AndrewPCBarratt

While content has been king on the Internet forever, there is no doubt that it is getting an ever increasing amount of attention. (Even if not everyone likes the term.) For me, I love to see brands offer real value in their communications, rather than just pushing out another empty ad slogan. But it requires an honest mindshift for corporations to become Contentrepreneurs. So we asked some of the bright minds at our most recent Demystifying Digital conference, D2 Content, for their insight and advice.

Top Issue or Barrier for Brands: Cultural Change

Alex Hultgren of Ford, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed, Steve Webb of Google, Johanna Virtanen of Kiosked

Top Tips for Brands: Take risks. Emotional hooks. Don’t forget about relationships.

Seb Bell of H+K, me, Simon Langford of GE, Johanna Virtanen of Kiosked, Richard Fletcher of the Telegraph.co.uk, Richard Millar of H+K, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed, Alex Hultgren of Ford

1. Value Creation.

2. Commitment.

3. “Create Once. Distribute Everywhere.”

Not sure what is in the October air but my goodness it has been busy at H+K Towers this week

Monday saw the external launch of our Aviva S2S Mumsnet campaign which is  centred on encouraging parents to talk to their children about running away from home in order to  raise awareness of the issue, and of the Railway children charity.  As its such an important and topical issue, our launch story has gained lots of media interest including Yahoo.com, Female.First.co.uk and Radio 5 Live and is naturally all over the twittersphere

Mumsnet.com Running Away home page

Also on Monday, we launched Family Investment’s Hotspots report which has received widespread national media coverage including seven of the national newspapers reporting the story. If you have somehow managed to miss it, Wokingham is the best place to live to bring up a family.

Hotspots Report Infographic

Our healthcare team has been working hard at the European Society of Medical Oncology’s (ESMO) annual meeting (a huge event in the world of cancer research) which took place in Vienna last weekend. During ESMO the team supported a media roundtable where two leading experts in the field of bone metastases, a severely painful type of bone cancer often associated with advanced stages, were well received by the audience including 14 top-tier European journalists from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.  Don’t just take our word for it, check out this infographic about the hot topics from the meeting

The Healthcare team also recently won some inspiring new business with The Harley Street Clinic in London. Earlier this week, members of the team had the opportunity to visit the clinic’s recently refurbished Paediatric Intensive Care Unit to see firsthand the importance of the unit in providing complex care to very ill children. The team is excited to be working with H+K offices in Kuwait on this project. See more of the great work done by the clinic here

Our Food + Drink team have also had a rewarding week, after over seven months of campaigning for public votes, yesterday the Transform Your Patch team took Fazer from N-Dubz to Dartford Skate Park to celebrate his triumph in Transform Your Patch – a regeneration campaign from Britivic and PepsiCo that has transformed around 165 outdoor spaces across the UK.  Since March, Fazer has been competing against three other celebrity faces, to win an additional £100,000 for an outdoor space he is passionate about, skate parks. Yesterday saw him emerge triumphant against Densie Van Outen campaigning for playgrounds, Robbie Savage squaring up for five-a-side football pitches and Emma Willis championing picnic areas and parks. The £100,000 will now go towards making sure communities get the most out of the transformed skate parks across the UK. Read more about the campaign here.

Our Energy + Industrials team have also been mega busy, not only did they launch Enphase Energy into the UK at Solar Power UK – we set up and staffed media interviews with the key trades to support the launch. Fantastic response so far!

… But they also provided media support for the launch of Sheringham Shoal wind farm off the coast of Norfolk – resulting in a lovely exclusive with Channel 4 News, take a look at the video

And as if that wasn’t enough, we also helped Pampers® and UNICEF launch their “1 pack = 1 vaccine” initiative for the seventh year running, celebrating that together they have helped eliminate Maternal & Newborn Tetanus (MNT) in eight of the world’s poorest countries.

Roll on the weekend!  Hope you all have a good one!

Pharma and healthcare has an image problem. Or at least, it has sometimes had a problem conveying itself in a compelling way through visual media. It’s curious then, that a number of prominent pharma companies in the US have set up corporate accounts on Pinterest, the latest much-hyped plaything of the social media world. Bayer US, Boehringer Ingelheim, Menarini Spain, GE and Novo Nordisk have all begun populating their boards with healthy-looking people and clinical researchers on a site more often associated with pictures of wedding dresses and cakes.

Let’s take a step back and explain Pinterest for those who may not yet have come across the site. Pinterest allows you to ‘organize and share things you love’ so your collection of paperclip sculptures can be ranked according to the number of prizes they have won and your photo albums of Iggy the pet stick insect can be shared with all of your friends. The medium is incessantly visual, as posts consist almost solely of either images or video, which can then be shared (‘repinned’), liked or commented upon by other users. While the site has grown at an exponential rate in the US, it remains to be seen whether it will have the same impact among the same groups of people in the UK and elsewhere when the site spends some of its recently-raised funds for international expansion. What does seem clear is that the site is growing fast and companies have begun to take note.

Now, back to that image problem. It may be exciting for pharma companies to have accounts across all the latest social media platforms, but it is important for companies to ask whether this will provide tangible benefits from a strategic communications perspective. Between them, Bayer, Boehringer, and Novo have a total of 355 followers. Meanwhile, the accounts don’t seem to have elicited much in the way ‘interaction’ or ‘engagement’ with these followers. 

 On the other hand, GE Healthcare has managed to capitalise on both the clout of its parent group and the innovative work done in other areas of the business to transform apparently visually unappealing engineering and energy operations into captivating images and video. By posting via the General Electric umbrella account, the healthcare arm already has an audience of over 9,562 followers, and the specialist healthcare Pinboards are original and well-populated. More importantly, they are also well planned with a clear remit and strategy.

 Of particular note are the Cancer Pintherapy and Pinspire boards, which manage to be both warm and engaging. The Pintherapy board features a collection of pictures alongside famous motivational quotes and experiences of ordinary people affected by cancer and particulalry breast cancer. Pinspire asks users to submit their own inspiring content on the subject of cancer experiences, one of which is then chosen to be featured each week. Just as with the GE Healthymagination Facebook page, the account is particularly good at interacting with users promptly and with a personal touch.

It remains to be seen whether pharma and healthcare companies can make Pinterest into a truly effective communication tool, or, for that matter, whether Pinterest itself will survive in an often faddy social media environment.

This week, the marketing (and tech) world will watch Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (@Jack) take the stage at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to accept the prestigious Media Person of the Year award. Like Google (Eric Schmit 2011) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg 2010) before them, Twitter (via CEO Dick Costello) has resisted the media company label. But there is no doubt that Twitter is now an established element in most brands’ communication plans. And Twitter is returning the love. Beyond the available ad inventory of Promoted Tweets, Trends and Accounts, here are my favorite brand friendly elements of the platform.

01. HASHTAGS ARE THE NEW TAGLINES: Or even the new headlines, like Twitter’s proud banner on the Palais des Festivals.

Brands need to choose them wisely and consider how they may be used/abused, but what’s really interesting is that what is essentially an element from the world of code has become a must have for major marketing campaigns. I’d love to see ads for mass market products that are pure tag. Because what the ad would actually be saying is that the brand is not telling you what to think, but simply pointing you to a place where you can see what other people think. And of course have your say. Proof that company is indeed ‘inviting you into the conversation’.

02. PAGES WITH BENEFITS: From the start, brands got the same canvas as any user. 140 characters and a fairly utilitarian page. You could tell a lot about a company by how they dealt with that and much has been written about the need to be have a trained team of community managers that are nimble, real, and speak in the vernacular. But now brands are offered Enhanced Profile Pages. Bigger (aka better) branding space. Ability to pin (aka promote) a specific tweet to the top of the page. While users probably spend even less time on a corporation’s Twitter page than they do on that company’s Facebook page, these added features can help keep key messages on top. To cut clutter on verified accounts (mostly granted to brands, celebrities and influencers) they’ve just announced a toggle function to include or exclude Tweets that begin with an @username. Personally I like the ALL option, but it is clear Twitter is trying to help brands keep the customer service aspect of Twitter from dominating a brand’s feed.

03. TWITTER HEARTS LIVE EVENTS & APPOINTMENT TV: Like Oreos and milk, it is almost impossible to enjoy a major football match or red carpet broadcast without dunking into tweets. Even if you are not on Twitter yourself, the mass media is now addicted to these always on vox pops and will read some to you in-between the play by play. It is a natural organic use of the platform, but also one Twitter Inc. has wisely nurtured. Et voilà: Twitter launches Hashtag Pages, a curated collection of accounts and tweets about that event. Chosing NASCAR as the launch partner (and topic for their first ever tv advert) shows how smart Twitter leadership wants to appeal to the heartland now, not just the cool costal power users. Twitter says Hashtag Pages are for events, not brands. But that could change, especially as we speed toward the Olympics where the event and the sponsors are more mashed up than ever. And isn’t #CannesLions a brand?
Comments welcome.

Prior to our Demystifying Digital conferences, we survey our client delegates to measure interest in online platforms. Google+ always ranks in the top three results. Launched in June 2011, in the now familiar invite-only to build buzz mode, G+ opened up to everyone soon after. Brand pages were officially added in November 2011, although early adopter Ford famously got to keep their Page. Last month’s redesign and last week’s new mobile app, show the love and importance of G+ to Google overall. Admittedly a fan of the Circle concept, I think now is a good time to highlight some key points about the platform. Perhaps it was inevitable, but imho it was a major PR mistake to allow Google+ to be defined by the media as a competitor to Facebook. I believe it is something quite different.

1. Google+ is not ‘another Facebook’ — it is a social unifier for all Google products

Googler Paul Coffey, speaking at D2 Energy, officially described G+ as a layer, not another channel. Altimeter analyst and Twitterati Jeremiah Owyang agrees, “…all of google is one product.” Google’s recent move to reduce more than 60 privacy policies for their products (like YouTube, Gmail, and Search) down to one main policy is part of their stated intention to ‘treat you as a single user across all our products’. For brands, clearly this helps Google show more relevant search results and ads. And the social layer of G+ means I can look at a Search result page in ‘regular’ Google and see which products my connections have +1 or linked to. Another just announced integration is the ability to engage with G+ content (view, comment, +1, etc) through a Google+ notification email in Gmail. Destination sites are so old web. Google products with G+ functionality will be anywhere on the Internet a user is likely to want or need them.

2. The creative possibilities of Hangouts are ever expanding

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I attended The Economist’s annual The Big Rethink conference for marketers and PR professionals on the future of consumer marketing. The day was chaired by Economist journalist, Robert Lane Green and speakers were from HSBC, OgilvyOne, Virgin Media and many more. The conference focused on how brands are changing and how the consumer’s expectations and perceptions are shifting.

Here are my three key learnings from the event:

• Experience will keep your consumer interested

Nader Tavassoli, Professor, London Business School kicked off his presentation by stripping things right back to basics to remind us all what ‘to consume’ means: to destroy something through use. More often than not, marketers focus on the product and not on the user. Just consuming a product is not where value lies; it is in the experience of consuming it.

Experience is vital in today’s consumer marketing and it will only get more pronounced; McDonald’s recent advertising campaign is testament to this.

By focusing on the consumer instead of the product they subtly evoke the emotional connection the consumer has with their brand – a feeling of comfort and familiarity on an otherwise disorientating first day at a new job.

McDonald’s understands that the consumer does not want the best hamburger ever made. The consumer wants the recreation of a memory – the first time they ate a MacDonald’s. People want to own experiences and the emotional connection you get with a brand will bring consumers back for more.

• Know your truth and achieving ‘meaningful consumption’

Brands need to understand their truth, explore their roots and find the tenets of their story. Storytelling has always been a no-brainer in PR and marketing but the consumer is finding out more about brands and what they advocate through social media. Chris Clark, Head of Marketing at HSBC warned the room that with knowing your truth creates expectation and these expectations must be met by your brand and employees.

Anne Lise Kjaer talked about truth as a means towards ‘meaningful consumption’. Consumers want to engage with brands that have a notable impact on your sense of wellbeing and quality of life.

According to Anne, only 20 per cent of brands fall into this category. Worryingly, consumers would not care if 70 per cent of brands disappeared, if it meant 30 per cent offered them meaningful consumption.

Kjaer’s Global Mindset Map (www.kjaer-global.com) clearly links trends, values and typologies to produce a profound understanding of people and their lifestyle and highlights challenges opportunities for companies to address.

To achieve ‘meaningful consumption’ you need to bring the customer into your business. The key to marketing success is listening, engaging and understanding your customer.

Jeff Dodds, Executive Director, Brand and Marketing at Virgin Media and Chris Clark (HSBC) stressed the necessity to represent the customer in our businesses, otherwise they will be forgotten and our marketing efforts will fail. Ultimately, it is time for marketers to realize that the power lies with the people rather than just in the boardroom.

Although some businesses will find bringing the customer into their business difficult, it is detrimental not to engage them. Big companies must see things from their customer’s point of view, do not assume one size fits all.

• Experiment: Don’t be afraid to do it!

Google does it all the time, some things work, some things don’t and our perception of Google as a successful business has not been tarnished for it.

Companies must embrace creative thinking in order to succeed in tomorrow’s marketing. Encourage creativity within your business and encourage employees to tell their visions of the story. Let them be your evangelists. Adapt your campaigns to the different personalities of your consumers and encourage them to shape and help make your product or service better.

Launching the world’s first snore absorption room; creating the world’s biggest shave; reinterpreting art with technology; revealing the best place in the UK to bring up a family… As 2011 draws to a close, we take a look back month by month at some H+K Strategies campaigns and work throughout the year.

January: City & Guilds Million Extra

You're hired: Karren Brady+ City & Guilds' Chris Jones

To start the new year, preparations to launch City & Guilds first ever Apprenticeship Summit went underway early on. The aim of the campaign was to help ensure one million Apprenticeship starts by summer 2013.

In January, we commissioned a report to identify the barriers employers face in hiring apprentices with the findings discussed by key political and business leaders at the Summit, hosted by Apprentice star Karren Brady.

Nearly 100 pieces of coverage resulted from this campaign as well as a request from Professor Alison Wolf to receive a copy of the full report after seeing the articles to include in her Government review of 14-19 education.

February: Intel Remastered

Shortlisted for various industry awards, our Technology team created an exciting art campaign- Intel Remastered to showcase the creative application of Intel technology. The project saw 13 modern artists reinterpret iconic masterpieces using digital technology and techniques.

Pushing the boundaries of art and creating one of the most talked about art events on the year, the stories and inspiration behind classics such as Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ were retold and presented to a digital-savvy audience.

Read the rest of this entry »