Consumers migrating to online editions from conventional media

By Bob Wheatley

In the recent W&T Media Trends consumer survey, consumers voted their preference for receiving news and information about products and services from online sources vs. conventional broadcast and print media.

Marketing PR strategies grounded in traditional print and broadcast media may fail to reach their intended goals to inform and engage consumers who increasingly prefer to get information from digital sources.

Online More Important Than Ever

•    61% of survey respondents said they prefer to receive news and information on new products online rather than through conventional platforms.

•    Importantly, 61% also said over 80% of their daily consumption of product news and information resides in the digital world.

•    The survey also revealed 73% of respondents believe editorial media (ie. newspaper and magazine web editions) is the most trusted source of new product information over blogs (16%) and brand-produced content (11%).

Media Adapts to New Consumer Behaviors

Importantly traditional media understand the migration to online is moving ahead unabated — and to retain audiences, more investment is being made in their digital presence and editions. As testimony to this development, TIME Inc. recently announced plans to publish online tablet versions of 21 of their top titles before the year is out. And 53% of survey respondents indicated they either already own a tablet computer or have plans to purchase one.

Implications for New Product Success

Digital convenience, comfort with screens, technology improvements and daily interaction with devices is changing the pattern for how consumers prefer their daily diet of news and information.

New product launch strategies weighted too heavily on media outreach to print versions of magazines and newspapers, or conventional broadcast, may miss the mark to interact with consumers where they are increasingly spending their time and attention.

Earned media outreach plans and programs should be optimized to push greater time and investment towards digital media platforms and editions.

Blogs and other “citizen journalist” outlets remain a vital part of the marketing mix, but should be viewed in context of their audience reach and should operate as an extension of media activity, not a replacement for online editions of mainstream editorial media. The cachet of the professional journalist/reporter still retains relevance and value.

A clear vision helps drive your career decisions and events

By Robert Wheatley

Here’s the next installment falling from an insightful and engaging conversation with Ron Culp and what can be gleaned from his experiences and path which represent guidance for anyone with some ambition to excel in the PR world.

As we segue to talk about his career moves and key moments along the continuum that opened doors and built opportunities, the “get involved” theme is pervasive. And it is a reference point for the entire conversation, so we will revisit it here.

Ron’s first piece of advice: be willing to make a geographic move. To be sure there’s some natural pull to stay close to home and family. But openness to a move also opens possibilities and doors. In Ron’s case his college experiences had brought to the front an intense interest in the political game. And his willingness to make a move from home territory in Indianapolis to Albany, New York for a post with the New York legislative assembly — It created the launch pad for the political experience he wanted and inevitably would need.

“I would not have been on Eli Lily’s radar screen if I hadn’t done it. So back to Indianapolis for a time. Next up was a big jump in title and responsibilities again by being open to a move to Connecticut with Pitney Bowes as PR chief and a chance to rub shoulders with New York-based media,” he said.

There’s an underlying condition here that should be flagged: a willingness to step outside your comfort zone and take some risks. No great thing can ever be accomplished without doing so.

The Pitney Bowes stint turned out to be mission critical for the next move – to Sara Lee. Critical because the search criteria Sara Lee was working off called for finding someone from the East Coast with New York media experience. “I was the perfect fit for them – a mid-westerner with New York credentials.”

Choices, choices, choices – time and how you spend it…

Lots of people – probably most people – go into careers with no network. In Ron’s case his “get involved” philosophy started early and became foundational for a life well spent. It is paying dividends 20, 30 years later. What’s the action step? Say yes. Raise your hand. Get involved. Seek out opportunities for extra-curricular activity.

“I’m on the Lincoln Park Zoo Board sitting together with the captains of industry here. These relationships matter now and will again in the future,” he reports. It is this eye always on the future ball that helps bring shape to decisions and steps and moves. What’s going on underneath all this is a larger goal – we’ll get to the reveal of what that is shortly.

From Sara Lee to Sears and then a complete departure from this client-side focus to agency life at Sard Verbinnen. Why you ask? “Because you need the experience of a consultant in order to become one,” Ron says. You see Ron wants to walk ultimately in the footsteps of another person he has known, respected and held in high regard: Jack Raymond – a business consultant who during the course of his storied career helped organizations understand the barriers to their success and how to make better decisions.

The move to the agency world provided that inside dig into the life of a consultant. We are advisors, strategists, soothsayers, analysts, creatives, idea people — also builders of programs and campaigns aimed at improving and growing the business and reputations of those we represent. Ron wants to be Jack. And now he has the pedigree to do it with substance and horsepower.

If we can distill Ron’s recipe into its core elements, a few key ingredients bubble up to the surface:

o      You need to approach your choices and time decisions with a healthy dose of ambition

o      You need to construct a thoughtful and considered path that is always forward looking

o      There is an absence of fear here — A willingness to go outside the comfort zone

o      Thus an ability to make the moves that will accommodate the purposeful path

o      And supremely important, involvement in outside activities that leads to relationship creation

Keep the involvement going. Keep adding. Keep fueling. And keep your eye squarely on the target. As Ron can now say definitively: “Yes, I am now Jack.”

What’s your story?

Your brand as expert in third-party content key to completing media picture

By Robert Wheatley

Ok, you’re doing business in a high involvement category like pet care, or you’re competing in a business where you’ve found a relevant issue or passion your consumers truly care about — like childcare products and addressing the parenting advice needs of new moms and dads.

You want to take advantage of the vast capabilities social networks provide along with other digital channels to publish, to inform, to give your brand a voice as a trusted source of education and information on topics that matter to your best customers.

Curating — another step along the path…

To be sure optimizing earned, owned, shared and paid channels is critical to taking a holistic approach to communication – one that recognizes the consumer is truly in control of the relationship and we need to be present where and when they choose to engage.

That said there’s another and equally compelling arena for engagement that truly helps complete the picture on the road to becoming more valuable and enticing as a trusted, useful source.

This story in the Chicago Tribune charts the sea change in the pet care category as super-premium diets gain traction and consumers increasingly see their pets as family. So behaviorally they’re working over-time to understand the finer points of pet nutrition. There’s just so much to learn for so many sources. Who can make sense of it?

Savvy pet care brands can help. You can help too in your category. How? Curate the third party info out there.

The Internet presents itself as a gigantic and perhaps infinite library and broadcaster of material, information, media and advice. Brands can play an invaluable role to help separate wheat from chaff in the overwhelming landslide of this content — and in doing so bring the best of third party media forward in an organized, easy-to-consume way.

The goal: be an expert and respected tour guide in subject areas that matter to the relevant lifestyle passions and interests of your core consumers. Simply said don’t just publish exciting original content but also edit the abundance that’s already out there from other credible sources.

Add context to the content…

There’s more to it than simply aggregating a portfolio of blogs, articles and broadcasts. Add context and commentary that helps layer on a sense of meaning, direction, guidance and interpretation. This is what a trusted source does: separate the useful from the not so and then add color and value to the most relevant material out there.

After all, your brand is an “expert” in its category, right? Who better to help sift through and identify the best and then provide it to your fans and followers.  Just another way to add greater value  — to matter — in the relationship you’re working tirelessly to build with consumers and stakeholders.

You agree?

YouTube functionality supports converting engagement to sale

By Robert Wheatley

Scanning the recent edition of Google’s recent self-published e-zine Think Quarterly, I ran across an article on functionality improvements at YouTube that permit viewers to buy items they like within the production via a point/click hotlink to another web platform.

Video is an engaging and entertaining medium. With high involvement categories that naturally attract an enthusiastic fan base, you can immediately see the business-generating opportunities when taking advantage of viewer interest and converting “in the moment” to a purchase opportunity.

The site above, You-Tique, is a great example of a fashion business aggregating a series of trend videos around everything from “What’s New for Spring” to occasion based ideas, such as what to wear for a hot date. The use of a Stylist expert helps set the credibility and value equation at the right level right out of the gate.

From there viewers can watch a model wearing the products and click to buy while viewing the video. It’s easy, pretty painless and, in my opinion, way more effective than looking at still photos of a product with narrative information alongside.

Zappos has figured out that online e-tailing gets compelling when you combine the right products with exemplary service. So who knows if the folks behind You-Tique have similar policies for returns and friendly live support. That said, the concept of watch and buy is just plain captivating.

You get richer story telling, context, validation and other benefits that outshine static web site galleries by adding the flavor of video production to the whole proposition. May not be right for every product category but this peek at the future is exciting none-the-less. Think Quarterly says the click through rates for You-Tique have been stellar…

What do you think?

By Robert Wheatley

One of the greatest marketing evolutions in the Internet era: brands have acquired the ability to be content creators – publishers, producers of their own media. This fits perfectly with the other great strategic upheaval — brands can no longer simply imprint messages and attempt to exert “control” over consumer behavior by pushing messages at consumers.

As I write this, many brands still believe this will work.

The brand/consumer relationship is tougher to build now and demands a more selfless form of engagement. It requires singular devotion to understanding and mining relevance to the consumer’s lifestyle interests and passions. Brands-that-matter to their users can earn permission for a relationship by connecting tangibly, emotionally to activities and interests their consumer already cares about.

So doesn’t it stand to reason that working hard to become a source of valuable, interesting, engaging, entertaining information about these lifestyle passions could be important? For a fashion or jewelry brand it’s the opportunity to tap into that creative self-expression that is at the core of what drives a fashion-focused person. For the food brand it might be enabling the culinary creativity, learning and emotional payoff going on everyday in the kitchen (experimenting with new dishes, tastes and techniques).

In virtually every category insight research can help you unearth this unique emotional grist that drives the most devoted fans and followers. And from there is an enormously powerful opportunity to cement that relationship by casting the brand as an enabler and provider of stories and content that offers intrinsic value – How? Information, ideas and experiences that help the consumer enjoy, do what they do better and connect with others that share their interests.

Trust is the key to engagement…

But the word trust looms large in this. How does a brand successfully establish itself as a trusted and valued source? Here are five ways a brand can develop a respected and reliable channel of rich-content media:

1. The value of respected outside voices

In the news business, outside quote-able sources are employed to validate assertions made in a news story. Similarly, outside experts, influencers and knowledge-brokers can bring their own credibility and cachet to the story telling in brand-owned media. Bring in the experts as contributors and steer clear of putting them in a compromised position of endorsing or directly selling your product.

2. The type, tone and tenor of the content matters

Watch the overt selling. Your media mission is to be helpful, useful. Think like a magazine editor or TV producer working to build exciting, interesting stories that add value to the reader’s lifestyle. Operate like a traditional media organization focused on reader and viewer benefit. Take a reportorial approach to the content. If the communication comes off like reporting and informing rather than persuading, you’ll earn the attention of your best followers.

3. Identify the storytellers

Create an editorial board of editors and contributors. If you identify and position the writers and producers, you humanize the entire interaction for your audience. You also create an environment for trust to take root because the contributors are identified and thus “real people” are engaged in the communication.

Create an editorial board of editors and contributors. If you identify and position the writers and producers, you humanize the entire interaction for your audience. You also create an environment for trust to take root because the contributors are identified and thus “real people” are engaged in the communication.

4. Transparency

How do real friends speak with each other? Honest, straightforward, real, open communication is fundamental between true friends. Treat your audience with the same respect. When issues and complaints arise, don’t hide or spin. Be matter-of-fact. Admit mistakes – probably the hardest thing to do, but also the most refreshing and endearing behavior you can show. Nobody’s perfect. No one expects your organization or brand to be perfect.

5. Be entertaining

You can’t bore your customer’s into loving you and coming back for more. Valuable, useful information is a prerequisite. How that information is served up can vary from tedious to fun and interesting. Make them laugh and make them cry. Video may be the most powerful medium available and offers the magic of words, picture, sound, music, personalities and color. It’s a bite-size world we live in now so keep it short. But most of all keep it entertaining. Mainstream media is working overtime to achieve this and so should you.

What’s the end game? Once a respected source, you have an open channel of communication that’s direct. And with content that’s got their attention – a long way from the good old days of beating people over the head with repetition and self-serving messages you hope and pray will break through the noise. Ten years ago brands could only dream of creating such a relationship. Now it’s possible.

What do you think?

From editorial shotgun to building influence and engagement

By Robert Wheatley

There may have been a time when massive distributions of press releases or video and audio news releases would have been the principal component in mainstream consumer media PR plans. Those days are gone.

Have you fully made the strategic and tactical shift to focus on a different view of engagement and communications? Do conversations and relationships sit at the forefront of your campaigns, more so than looking for gross impressions and measurement yardsticks based purely on audience number delivery?

Is Internet based communication, outreach and community building getting the budget priority or is mainstream media still grabbing the spending spotlight?

At a recent meeting of the Association of National Advertisers, Coca-Cola CMO Joe Tripodi was quoted in coverage of the event saying that conversations are now more important than impressions. To be sure effective message delivery has always been a vital consideration – nonetheless mass or “tonnage” of placements was also a major part of the editorial results story.

Think Different…
• We are now participating in the era of relationship-based marketing.

• Where influence is earned based on the brand’s ability to mine relevance with the target consumer’s lifestyle.

• And true communication is a not only an outcome of optimizing the intersection of earned media and owned content, but also developing and investing in conversational tools. The crux of this effort is more peer-to-peer than loading the communications shotgun for another outward facing message blast.

Quality of contact is important and quality builds from a base of reciprocity. How do you know if your thinking is right on this score? Ask yourself this question: am I actively looking for ways that my brand can act and operate to improve my best customer’s lifestyle and enable/facilitate their personal interests?

Pay-to-Play

Even mainstream media channels are in a state of transition as audience stats once employed to lure in advertisers gets thinned by the splintering of consumer attention — mostly to places where opt-in engagement work well because the content to consume is not about overt selling. That said, increasingly the lines between editorial (church) and paid (state) are blurring. Just as computers and TV are merging into one platform so is the ability to purchase alignment of a brand message within the content side of media — digital, print and broadcast.

This is tricky because a fine line exists here between useful, valuable, helpful messaging and something less than that. Nevertheless we can expect to see more of this ahead.

The Future…

Editorial media outreach is and will remain a relevant and significant part of the PR value proposition. That said, the strategic approach has changed from big distribution plays to focus on customization, relationship development, unique angles, exclusives and narrowcasting. And operating in parallel to earned media is a growing layer of direct forms of communication (and conversation in social platforms) where quality will forever outweigh quantity as the principle driver of effectiveness.

PR experts are content creators now in opt-in channels where relevance spells the difference between aggregating an audience of followers — or not. More strategy is required. More focus. More understanding of consumer desires and passions. More targeted, interactive media activity.

Are you there?

What say you?

This is the first in our series of question/answer posts about effective communication, best practices in PR and social media and an occasional look inside Wheatley & Timmons.

Any burning questions you would like us to weigh in on? Let us know!

A backwards glance shows seismic shift in the PR world

By Robert Wheatley

It was without a doubt one of the most powerful PR campaigns I’ve ever been associated with. An entirely new product category created from scratch off a compelling, dynamic public relations strategy. Yes, I said PR — not advertising or sales promotion. Over $100 million in sales (and that’s in 1994 dollars) was achieved and an 84% share of market within 16 months of launch. It was the introduction of First Alert brand carbon monoxide alarm products.

Recently we heard from the Wall Street Journal that futurist Richard Dawson believes newspapers will be irrelevant by 2022. The reference point for this incredible shift can be more fully appreciated by briefly looking backwards to a moment in time when conventional print and broadcast media were popular and respected sources of news, information and influence on consumer behavior and public opinion.

Here’s the story of PR campaign media strategies that were built from a full-scale deployment of earned media tactics.

• And the approach is no longer as relevant. New businesses are now developed in an interactive, narrowcast environment without push-button scale-ability

The lesson: the old rules no longer apply. New media protocols, planning processes and program strategies literally demand a transformation of our beliefs about brand building, PR strategies, how PR firms are put together. Thus how we look at messaging, outreach, measurement and evaluation of ideas is different than it was even 10 years ago.

When editorial media ruled!!

It was 1993, the firm I owned at the time, Wheatley Blair, was hired by First Alert, the leading home safety products brand in the US. They had invented the residential smoke alarm category and literally owned the retail market for them. Rich Timmons, now principal and President of Wheatley & Timmons, was the global marketing chief at First Alert – a marketer who had followed conventional paths focused on TV advertising and who was going to do something unprecedented: launch the next biggest thing to come along in his company’s history through PR.

A new category: Carbon Monoxide (CO) Alarms

We were awestruck the moment we learned that CO poisoning was the largest source of accidental poisoning deaths in America.

First Alert had created the first affordable residential detector for this previously unseen and little understood hazard that claimed at least 1,500 lives every year and injured thousands more.

The Silent Killer

How do you convince Americans to protect themselves from a hazard you cannot see, taste, smell or touch? And after all, headaches are common and ubiquitous, right? We created a theme that dramatically defined the threat.
• Poison center physicians, indoor air quality experts, leading fire service officials and others were recruited to help explain the problem and support the solution
• We built the Carbon Monoxide Information Bureau to house the scientific and medical evidence
• Brought together consumers who had lost loved ones in CO accidents to personalize and make the hazard tangible and real

Launching a Media Tsunami

Media tours were conducted with CO survivors and coordinated with local fire department representatives. We booked medical expert appearances on TODAY, Good Morning America and all of the network news programs. Placed in-depth hazard education features in national newspapers and virtually every major daily in the US. Similar treatments on family protection were secured in women’s service, lifestyle and DIY magazines. We assembled an in-house TV news production department that was producing a regular flow of 90-second video news packages.

Our tracking on consumer media impressions within six months topped 700 million and grew to over a billion. There were 6 o’clock news stories in major markets about lines outside stores exclaiming that First Alert alarm products were sold out. A major trade publication featured a quote from a senior buyer at Walmart who described First Alert CO alarms as the “cabbage patch doll of the hardware department.”

A business was created. A category established. First Alert doubled in size. Thousands of lives were saved in the process. Importantly, editorial media in virtually all channels was the instrument of awareness, education and motivation. The decline of traction, audiences and the splintering of media into hundreds if not thousands of platforms of self-interest make this story simply a reflection of a another age in media communication.

The same product launch, repeated today would be wholly different and geared to empower individuals to spread the word as much as media properties are addressed to influence the influencers.

For First Alert we constructed a media machine that hummed and produced and delivered editorial attention. That is no longer the way communication operates. Yet many still attempt to apply the old rules of quantity thresholds to a world now devoted to the quality and personalization of encounters with communication.

Nine years after we began, the agency moved on to represent Kidde, the other leading category brand. We helped them secure the number one market share position. This dramatic video PSA was part of the effort:

How would you launch the CO alarm category today?

Can we really fly blind and expect to be effective?

By Robert Wheatley

There are those great moments of clarity when something hits you. Often it can be something you already know, but your perspective and its horsepower (importance) will get injected with an entirely new level of “amen” when understanding adjusts or elevates a bit. Sorry to be oblique – this happened today while reading Brian Solis’ great book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.” Yes, there’s a point here and a recommendation.

The emergence of social media has changed the game for PR communications, to be sure. For instance as we’ve heard from virtually every social media pundit, conversation is better than any attempted monologue in brand communication strategy. Frankly its just wayyyy more difficult these days to push messages at people and get any traction. So communication that’s truly effective is no longer one-way.

That means PR people no longer sit solely on a “dissemination” platform (press releases, editor desk-sides, spokesperson media tours) to move messages outward through various channels of non-paid or earned media.

Now relationships and dialogue with influencers and other forms of “democratized” media have to be layered into the brand outreach recipe. What over-arching strategic issue does this immediately recommend? Listening.

Let’s look at the fundamental “best practices” involved in relationship building. If the best conversationalists are always the best listeners, and if brands must form relationships with their best users based on behaviors that approach similarity to what we would call real-world friendships rather than “transactional” relationships, does it stand to reason we should be hearing our best customers?

If relationships are to work, they’re built from a foundation of shared interest. And as covered many times in this blog, we know that brand relationships are earned based on what a marketer does to correctly discern and understand the consumer’s passions and concerns. And then operate as an enabler, facilitator, educator an community builder.

Furthermore if the media landscape is littered with self-published content created by customers, then it only makes sense to know what they’re saying, good or bad.

So listening jumps to the front as an integral part of fundamental PR strategy in the digital age. Right? Yet more often than not it is at the tail end of consideration in plans and sometimes the first to fall off the budget truck when pressure builds to make some cuts.

Of course formal Web-based listening tools should be employed and made integral to PR plans. They should also, however, receive the priority they deserve to be preserved when sacrifices are targeted on the spending front. This takes understanding on both the agency and client sides of the table about the value of it. To do less in some respects is to say that pushing messages outward remains the first and most important path.

Relevant communication springs from understanding. And that’s an outcome of getting quiet for awhile, and paying close attention to the conversations going on all around.

I for one will feel more comfortable as we work harder and with greater resolve to build the listening tools into the front end of the campaign strategy, and not a final layer that almost invites elimination due to its perceived lack of priority.

What do you think?

Hyper-consumption falls as new era of meaning and purpose takes hold

By Robert Wheatley

We are sitting at the threshold of a new epoch in brand marketing and communication. One where old voices tempting consumers to look for the thrill in upward mobility and finding the joy in toys is being replaced by a soulful search for things more meaningful, more substantive.

Now more than ever there is a need to align your brand with a new set of consumer-driven values, to chart a different course with a refreshed voice and message, more in sync with this seminal shift in consumer attitudes. Are you ready? Read on…

The economic “thwack” on the side of the head…

Leave it to one of the worst economic disasters America has seen to finally bring some closure on the continual debate between judging one’s life by the things you buy vs. the “softer values” of contentment, happiness and belonging. Hyper- consumption may well be the biggest casualty befalling strategies for marketing and business as the economy searches for a new path to growth.

While the cauldron of behavior change continues to boil…

Sure enough the pocketbook difficulties (owing more but having less) faced by consumers here and around the world remain bitingly fresh. According to a recent report published in Food Business magazine, consumer spending at restaurants declined 2.2% in 2009 from the previous year. While that may not sound like much it is nevertheless quite remarkable. The data just released by the Economic Research Service of the US department of Agriculture indicated it was the first year-to-year decline reported since 1949, and the largest single drop in the restaurant business since the height of the Great Depression in 1938.

Today Mintel research reveals that beverage alcohol sales were off by 4.9% in the on-premise channel (restaurants, bars and clubs) over the same period. As we cut back in restaurant visits, we’re moving our adult beverage consumption to the home front, up 1.2 % over the same period and over 21% since 2004.

Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?

In a Forbes magazine report showcasing a new consumer attitude study from ad agency Euro RSCG , we find that saving rather than splurging is preferred now by 87% of Americans. And that 79% of us have way more respect for people who live relatively simple, debt-free lives than we do the bling-centric luxury lifestyle folk. Says Forbes: “Robin Leach has been sucker punched by Ed Begley Jr.”

Having possessions for their own sake and a sense of a life well lived are being separated from each other. Eight in 10, according to the study, believe that society has become too shallow, focusing on things that don’t matter. In a way you might say the “hyper-consumerist” life didn’t pan out the way consumers thought it would.

So what does this mean?

The data helps us see a new picture emerge:

• 80% of consumers are now shopping more carefully and mindfully.

• 54% are paying attention to the environmental and social impact of the products and brands they buy.

• 57% believe that cause participation matters.

More is less today about accumulation of goods. Instead our focus is on community, simplicity, a sense of purpose and belonging.

Successful brands in the digital age grow because they’re learning to align themselves as enablers, facilitators and supporters of consumer lifestyle interests and concerns. So, too, the message in brand communications and PR must adjust to acknowledge the desire for greater meaning, for personal growth, giving back and cause involvement – living simpler and less cluttered lives.

How can your band and product portfolio help consumers live a more satisfying life? And help them realize their desire for greater meaning? For belonging and sense of community?

What say you?