Matt: Where’s a good place to go for lunch around here?

Nathan Bush: There’s a great place off Brunswick St Mall, near Subway, they do $5 wraps - they’re great.

Matt: Really?

Nathan: Yeah, just down the alley, past Subway. They’re great.

Matt: Cool.

Matt walks to mall, finds shop easily, it’s the one selling wraps just past Subway with the long queue outside. Pays five dollars for BBQ meatball wrap with lettuce, BBQ sauce and Mayo. Finds it to be Tasty.

Two Weeks later…

Matt: Hey Christie, do you want anything for lunch? I’m just going to get a wrap from this cool little shop in the mall.

Christie: No, I’m OK thanks, I’m going out today.

Matt: OK

Matt walks to mall, finds shop easily, it’s the one selling wraps just past Subway with the long queue outside. Pays five dollars for BBQ meatball wrap with lettuce, BBQ sauce and Mayo. Finds it to be Tasty. Comes back to office bearing wrap.

Gino: What have you got there?

Matt: It’s a wrap from this little shop in the mall. They’re five dollars. They’re great.

Gino: Nice

Kasey: What are you eating?

Matt: It’s a wrap from this little shop in the mall. They’re five dollars. They’re great.

Kasey: Nice. Is that a beer you’re drinking?

Matt: No, it’s an organic ginger ale from the wrap shop. It’s great.

Kasey: Nice

Matt: Wait.

Kasey: What?

Matt: I think there’s a hair in here.

Kasey: Oh.

Matt: Oh.

Gino: Oh.

Two Weeks later…

Derek: Hey Matt, what’s good for lunch around here?

Matt: Do you like Subway?

A friend sent me this case study yesterday - It’s from a site called Marketing Profs and it’s a great example of a “mom and pop” business using social media and word of mouth marketing to build a pet food business - a $2.5 million at that.

—

Launched in May 2007, K9 Cuisine helped fill a void created by the tainted-pet-food crisis of spring 2007 by offering pet owners safe dog-food and cat-food products along with reliable and accountable service.

“It wasn’t started to be the biggest dog food business in the world; it was started to solve a problem,” said Anthony Holloway, president of K9 Cuisine, referring to the lack of product availability and quality service his family had encountered during the catastrophe. “And it didn’t take long at all to figure out we were onto something.”

Though armed with only a shoestring budget and limited marketing experience, Holloway rapidly turned K9 Cuisine into a thriving business, mostly by letting its products and service speak for themselves.
In fact, he didn’t spend a dime on traditional advertising. Instead, he connected with others on forums and blogs who were equally frustrated with the industry, and he used a very soft approach to highlight the company’s values and product quality

Buzz quickly started to build.

Now, less than two years later, K9 Cuisine is bringing in $2.5 million in annual sales and expects to double that amount in the next 8-10 months.

Challenge

Like many pet owners, Anthony and Kay Holloway found themselves in a bind when the tainted pet food crisis hit in spring 2007. The closest store carrying the new food they had chosen for their dog was 70 miles away and had inconsistent product availability. Online, availability was unpredictable, as well, and the lack of customer service left the couple wondering whether or when their order would arrive. The experience drove them to start their own pet food supply business in May 2007 with both a physical and an online store. The business, called K9 Cuisine, offered not only a wide range of safe pet products but also great customer service and live support, information on real-time inventory levels, free shipping on orders over $50, and same-day shipping for most online purchases.

But like any new business, it had to get the word out and gain credibility in order to build a customer base. Working with a small marketing budget, Anthony Holloway decided to leverage free and low-cost online media to communicate the company’s sound values, hoping that this approach—combined with exemplary service—would generate positive word-of-mouth.

Campaign

Immediately, Holloway noticed how passionate and opinionated the online pet owner community can be and wanted to use this to the company’s advantage. Working with Shama Hyder, founder and chief marketing consultant of After the Launch, a Dallas-based marketing consultancy firm, he started by reaching out to these people through forums and blogs—an effort he continues to this day.

Using Google alerts, Holloway locates posts related to pet products sold by K9 Cuisine and contributes to the conversations, but only when he feels doing so would add value for the readership and support the company’s values.

“It’s not spam,” he explained. “We try to be transparent and engage in discussions about dog food and pets, not just plant our name in forums.”

To further build trust, K9 Cuisine has set up its own blog with a handful of contributors, including two vets and a dog trainer. At first, company blog posts revolved around pet nutrition, but content has since been expanded to include interesting pet-related news and company activities, such as the time the Holloways traveled to Houston to donate 6.5 tons of food to the local SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) after Hurricane Ike.

K9 Cuisine has also launched a customer survey/product rating system on the company Web site, whereby objective and non-moderated customer feedback is posted to the appropriate product pages in real time. To encourage participation, K9 Cuisine sends an email to customers 21-28 days after the sale, thanking them for their recent purchases and asking them to take a few seconds to share their opinions about the items ordered.

In addition, the company has established a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. The K9 Cuisine Facebook page is designed to reinforce company values and connect with customers on a more personal level. It includes recent blog posts, photos, and video, along with a place for users to upload their own photos and contribute to the discussion board.

“Our goal is to personalize an impersonal experience,” said Holloway. “Whether through the blog, our Web site or Facebook, we want to make it feel more meaningful than just placing an order.”

K9 Cuisine has also conducted a limited amount of Facebook advertising and maintains a small keyword ad budget.

Results

K9 Cuisine’s annual sales have hit $2,500,000—and they’re climbing. Growth during the company’s first year registered around 50% per month, and it continues at a rate of 15-20% per month.

“The sum of it all has made for some fantastic growth for our company,” said Holloway, referring to the combination of soft online promotion and the word-of-mouth that has been generated through positive customer experiences.

Conversion rates on the Web site range between 5.5% and 7.5%, with keyword buys accounting for the best conversion ratios.

Lessons Learned

• Become a trusted source: K9 Cuisine was able to showcase its values, demonstrate expertise, and build credibility—in a time when consumers were extremely skeptical of the industry—by remaining transparent and using a neighborly, contributory style rather than a pronounced marketing approach, to engage its market in forums and other channels where those users were already looking for answers. The company blog, with regular postings from pet professionals, has also helped to establish trust among the user base.
• Let consumer passion work for you: K9 Cuisine was careful to not support one product over another when it engaged with the market, understanding how deep some product loyalties run… and how important it is for the consumer not to feel as if they are doing anything wrong for their pet. Instead, the company let unmoderated customer opinions and ratings dictate which products would rise to the top; and by encouraging such independent reviews, it was able to further boost consumer confidence on its site.
• Follow through with excellent customer service: The online campaign has been effective in driving traffic to the Web site and convincing customers to purchase from K9 Cuisine, but that’s merely step one. Had the company not completed those sales with prompt and satisfactory service and lived up to its promises, the business could have easily fallen flat. Similarly, the positive word-of-mouth that has played such a key role in the company’s success would not have materialized. Instead, because service has remained a top priority for K9 Cuisine, it has been rewarded with consistently high customer-satisfaction ratings, in the range of 98-99%, along with repeat orders from 70-85% of its customer base.”It may start on a blog or with a Google search, but the bottom line is that it’s about customer service and exceeding those expectations,” said Holloway.

“There is only one tool, one platform, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, and that’s the Internet…”

It’s one of the more famous lines in recent American political campaign history, and it’s bang on the money. Literally, the Internet has changed the way candidates communicate with their electorate, but more than anything, it’s changed the way they raise dough. Interestingly, that quote came not from a candidate, but from a campaign manager. His name was Joe Trippi. You’ve probably never heard of him. He worked for a man called Howard Dean. You may vaguely remember him – in 2004 he was widely tipped to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination thanks to his revolutionary embracing of the Internet. He read blogs, organised rallies through meetup.com and emailed people to organise events. Trawl through news archives from 2004 and you’ll find thousands of articles on how amazing his use of the Internet was. Then he went and screwed it all up by screaming. John Kerry beat him to the post, and America voted for George W. Bush anyway. Game over.

So if Howard Dean had such a revolutionary Internet strategy back in 2004 and managed to raise enough money to become his party’s prime candidate, why does no-one remember him, and what was different about the 2008 race?

Two things. In fact they’re the two handiest things to have in any modern marketing campaign.

1. Remarkable
2. Social Media

Obama was a remarkable candidate. No one can argue against that. He is a gifted orator, a Harvard Law School graduate, an inspirational politician, a catalyst for change, loved by the most powerful celebrities in America and, of course, black. Democrats and Republicans both agree that is the most remarkable politician since JFK (not counting the effect Watergate and Monica Lewinsky had on buzz for Nixon and Clinton).

Howard Dean, on the other hand, was a bit of a toolbox. And, while Joe Trippi ran a great online campaign for him, they weren’t operating in a world with 100 million American Facebook and MySpace users.

Fast forward to 2008 and the landscape has changed dramatically. In four years social media takeup, and Internet usage in general has skyrocketed. In 2004 it was a teenage novelty, four years later it has become the main way friends and family communicate online. Barack Obama’s campaign team used social media better than anyone else and it gave them a huge advantage. Here’s how…

Facebook – Treat Friends as Friends and They’ll Like You

• Number of Obama Supporters on Facebook on election day: 3,000,000
• Number of McCain supporters on Facebook on election day: 600,000

Yep, for every Facebook supporter McCain had, Obama had five. In the online popularity stakes, there was no contest. However, that in itself wasn’t so much of a big deal. When Hilary Clinton was up against Obama she only had 20% of the friends he did, but the nomination contest went down to the wire. Obama’s real competitive advantage was a man named Chris Hughes. Before he was brought on board the campaign team he’d been busy running Facebook with co-founder, and college room-mate Mark Zuckerburg. With the co-founder of the most popular social networking site in the world on your campaign team, it was going to be hard to lose the popularity contest. Obama ‘got’ Facebook, while his opponent pretended not to care. As McCain’s deputy e-campaign manager put it, “Facebook users aren’t McCain voters anyway.” Which is a load of bollocks really, given that there are 36 million Facebook users in America.

McCain had a Facebook account of course, but in the same way John Howard had a YouTube channel in the 2007 Australian federal election, it was there because he would have looked out-of-touch without one, not because he’s the kind of guy who would have had one. McCain’s team spoke about him on his own profile in the third-person and his updates were lifeless. In fact, he didn’t even bother thanking his Facebook friends for support when he lost. Obama, on the other hand, came across just like one of your other friends would. Messages were signed-off with his first name and before he went and gave his victory speech in public, he sent this personalized note to Facebook fans:

“I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next. But I want to be very clear about one thing… All of this happened because of you.”

When Dale Carnegie wrote the world’s best-selling self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in 1936 (the same year John McCain was born), his number one rule was to ‘become genuinely interested in other people’. You don’t need to be a self-help guru to figure out why Obama had five times as many Facebook friends as McCain. And you don’t need a degree in political science to understand that friends = votes.

My.BarackObama.Com – A Virtual Army and Fundraising Juggernaught

Facebook was the most public social media component of Obama’s campaign, but in terms of overall effectiveness, it will be a small footnote in history. The crux of Obama’s social media marketing strategy, and the main reason he raised so much money, was the custom social network created for the campaign, My.BarackObama.com.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece for Marketing Mag called ‘Does your Company Need a Facebook Page’. It proved quite popular and I can sum up the gist of it with with this quote:

“Social networks exist to facilitate dialogue between passionate people. Their passion might be for a particular product, a cause, a celebrity or a football team, but they’re all in it together and they want to find other like-minded people to share their feelings with. If your business isn’t the kind of organisation that people are passionate (or at least mildy enthused) about, creating a social network around yourself will only serve to highlight that fact. At best, you’ll get a few staff members and cousins join, at worst, you’ll quickly find out no-one actually cares, which can end up looking rather embarrasing. If you honestly can’t envisage your clients or customers starting a Facebook group for your brand all by themselves, you probably shouldn’t have one.”

Applied to your average business, it makes sense. You can’t build a social network around something that people don’t care about because no-one will have anything to say. On the flip side, Obama isn’t your average business. Bush is the least popular president in generations and people were hankering for change. Obama was the most remarkable candidate since Kennedy and, suffice to say, he had a lot of fans. There was no way a custom social network dedicated to Obama was not going to work and hiring the co-founder of Facebook to run it was a stroke of genius.

My.BarackObama.com ended up with more than 1,000,000  members, which makes it (as far as I know) the biggest private social network in the world. McCain had nothing like it and Hilary couldn’t come close. Members were passionate and campaign management empowered them to enact the change they wanted to see. My.BarackObama.com was, in no uncertain terms, an army.

Instead of relying on an external tool, like Facebook or MySpace, which was beyond their control, campaign managers used My.BarackObama.com to maintain complete control over the dialogue and craft their messages precisely how they wanted them. They used it as a rallying tool to get supporters excited, a messaging centre to communicate with supporters and allow them to directly contact interested voters on behalf of Obama, a revenue raiser and a planning tool to put local supporters in touch with each other and allow them to set up meetings and arrange events.

Watch this video overview of My.BarackObama.com and you’ll see exactly why it worked so well. It’s probably the best example of a corporate social network the world has ever seen.

Pay particular attention to the fundraising section at 3:22. By getting a million supporters to hassle everyone they know for small amounts of money, they were far more effective in raising huge piles of cash than they would have been if they’d asked a hundred thousand people to donate large amounts. Anyone who’s a fan of Chris Anderson’s long tail theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail) will know exactly why this is such an effective strategy in the social media age.

At one stage in the nomination race Hilary was forced to loan to her own campaign $5 million to try and keep up with Obama’s fundraising. By June 2008 Obama had raised more than three times as much money as John McCain. My.BarackObama.com was, in Barack’s own words “the largest grassroots campaign in history”.

YouTube – You Don’t Need Broadcast Media When You’re this Popular Online

Obama’s use of YouTube was staggeringly successful. Every modern politician has a YouTube Channel (even our very own John Howard had one), but the world had never seen anything like http://au.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom. Look at the stats:

• Subscribers: 141,678
• Channel Views: 19,865,534
• Videos Uploaded: 1,823

Those figures sound impressive enough out of context, but compare them to the next most popular celebrities and you’ll see just how popular Obama’s YouTube site was:

Oprah:

• Subscribers: 46,352
• Channel Views: 1,790,402
• Videos Uploaded: 76

AC/DC:

• Subscribers: 28,302
• Channel Views: 1,180,100
• Videos Uploaded: 20

While YouTube views aren’t a measure of voter support, they are definitely a measure of popularity. If the American Presidential race is the world’s biggest popularity contest, Obama was definitely the prom queen.

Flickr – Bypass the Press

As Stefano Boscutti from Australia’s own SBS put it on his New New Media blog:

“So which news organisation landed one of the biggest photo stories of the year, exclusive behind-the-scenes pictures with the Obama family on election night? None of them. Obama’s personal photographer snapped the photos and uploaded them to Flickr under a Creative Commons license, skipping the media altogether.  The popularity of the photos subsequently crashed the site.  This is what happens when you get the first post-boomer president who actually gets the net.  The future just got brighter.”

Check out Obama’s Flickr stream at http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/ and you’ll see literally hundreds of examples of the Obama team using the world’s most popular photo-sharing site in exactly the way it was designed – for giving your friends an insight into your life. By providing that ‘behind the scenes’ footage, it served to humanise Obama, which in turn won friends and influenced people.

Twitter – You don’t Have to Talk Back

Obama’s Twitter account was a great example of how politicians can use this micro-blogging service as a one-way communication channel. Rather than trying to message back the 133,000+ people who follow him, which would have been logistically impossible and ended up hugely impersonal (the antithesis of social media dialogue), Obama’s campaign team used it as a broadcast tool.

The danger of using social media in a campaign is that once you start engaging with one person, everyone else will expect you to be their friend. By being up-front and not engaging anyone in this particular medium, there was no expectation amongst followers that they were going to get any attention. Australian politicians Kevin Rudd (http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM) and Malcolm Turnbull (http://twitter.com/turnbullmalcolm) might do well to follow Obama’s lead sooner or later, or they’re going to end up with lots of angry followers wondering why no-one writes back to them.

Furthermore, in a sign that Obama took Twitter seriously during the campaign, but doesn’t see it as part of a viable long-term communication strategy for a world leader, Obama stopped tweeting once the election was over. Fittingly, it was with a message to his supporters that neatly sums up why engaging social media (and the people who use it) won him the election:

“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks 5:34 AM Nov 6th”

Truer words were never spoken.

Mother Theresa was probably the BEST marketer of the 20th Century. Her directive from senior management was to “go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation” She ended up running 610 missions in 123 countries. It’s downhill from there though.

The chill-out room at schoolies week. School scripture. Suspicious looking ‘learn to surf’ lessons run by smiley people with tents. Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album.

The two young men in suits with nametags, door-knocking on a bright Sunday morning. Hillsong. Ted Haggard.

Missionaries, ‘helping’ the aborigines, the islanders, the Africans and the Chinese.

The man standing on a street corner, quoting from the bible and talking about the end of the world.

Abortion ‘help lines’. Jihad training centres.

Terrorism.

Religious people do some terrible marketing, but they’re incredibly effective at it. Proof, I think, that the more remarkable your product is, the less you need to worry about strategy.

Name one other brand people are quite literally happy to die for. And don’t say Marlboro.

Kirrihill Wines sent me some bottles of vino a couple of weeks ago as part of their wine for bloggers program. I blogged about the wine from a social media marketing perspective a couple of times and a lot of people read with interest. In fact, as is the nature of the medium, word spread around the world. A few US wine critics even took notice.

Which is lovely, but the feedback from most comments was “that’s great Matt, nice use of social media marketing, but what did you think of the wine?”

I figured it was about time I told you. In fact, it was pretty good. I sampled half a dozen bottles with friends and gave half a dozen away to co-workers who expressed interest. I wanted to wait a couple of weeks before I wrote anything about the wine so I was working from my lasting impressions, rather than my immediate impressions.

The results are as follows:

• After two weeks I could not remember the exact name of the winery that had sent me the dozen bottles. I thought it was Kirrihill Wine and had to go back and change the title of the blog post when I visited their website just then and realised it was Kirrihill Wines. Not a big deal, but, interesting.
• Of the 10 people in this office who saw the bottles on my desk, the six who professed to be the most interested in wine were given a bottle. None of them can remember the name on the label, although two knew it started with a K and one thought it was Kirribilli. So, including me, that’s 0/11 brand recall after two weeks. They all thought the wine was OK and said that if they saw it in a bottle shop they’d consider buying it again, but none were raving about it. Ouch.
• I sampled the following wines:
  • Chardonnay Viognier
  • Riesling Pinot Gris
  • Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc
  • Garnacha Rosé
  • Cabernet Merlot
  • Shiraz Viognier
  • Tempranillo Garnacha
• I was actually really looking forward to trying the Riesling Pinot Gris and went to the trouble of having a dinner party and cooking a thai-style bbq prawn and macadamia nut salad to match the wine, and it was OK, but it didn’t really stand up against a few of my other favourite mid-range rieslings from Petaluma and Pewsey Vale.
• The Tempranillo Garnacha was fantastic and unusual. I would buy it again. In fact, I would actively seek it out in a bottle shop. If I could remember the name. It would be nice if their website mentioned more about it because it’s such an unusual variety.
• The rest of the range was OK, but to be honest, I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy them again.
• I loved the packaging.

I’ll drop Kirrihill a line in the next few weeks and do a more in-depth interview about how the campaign went because it’s certainly generated some buzz, but for now, those are my thoughts as a wine drinker.

Oh, by the way, if you’re a wine fan and haven’t checked out Project Vino, make sure you do. It’s an online Australian wine community and it’s brilliant.

Imagine if you knew exactly what your customers were thinking. Imagine if you knew EXACTLY what they wanted. Imagine if you could switch your TV to a channel which showed non-stop, live coverage of your customers thoughts about your brand, their concerns and their ideas on how you could do things better. Imagine if it was free and, as a company, you were encouraged to participate in the conversation. Sound satisfying?

Get Satisfaction is a community that helps companies engage their customers in dialogue. The concept is that members of the public with an idea can share their thoughts and then employees can jump online and show that your company is listening – it could be a rep from your corporate affairs department, or a guy from the mail room – it doesn’t matter. 6,873 organisations have joined the site, including some big names like Adobe, Apple, BBC and Dell. It’s early days yet, but the theory goes that rather than calling a customer support line and getting an average answer, customers can leave a comment on this website and get exactly the answer they want from the right department in a day or so. It’s a completely new approach to customer service, but it appears to be working.

I made a deal with Kirrihill Wines a week or so ago.

We didn’t sign any contracts or even shake hands. I haven’t met anyone from the company, I’ve never been to see their grapes growing, in fact I haven’t even been to the region.

The deal we’ve made isn’t written down on paper, in fact it hasn’t even been spoken about. What we have is a social media marketing pact. They’ve engaged me in an online dialogue and we’ve made an exchange.

The exchange was as follows:

• As an ‘influencer’ I get: a dozen bottles of wine
• As a wine manufacturer they get: a conversation

Zakazukha Zoo isn’t a blog about wine. I’m not an influential wine critic. While I’m under no obligation to blog about their product, if I like it, statistics show that the chance of me recommending it to my friends is greater than 50%. They are presuming I will at least like the wine and they are hoping I will love it. They have confidence in their product and as someone with some social media reach, they think my dialogue is worth investing in.

Here’s why…

The reason they chose to send me 12 bottles, as opposed to one bottle, or a gift voucher, or a nice comment on my blog, is because the following information is public knowledge about my reach as an influencer:

• I have a blog which is regularly read by at least 30 people (they don’t know the actual stats, but that’s the number of regular commenters)
• I blog mostly about social media, Google and Facebook, but I also mention wine from time to time and I have blogged specifically about Kirrihill Wine.
• I have 177 friends on Facebook
• I have 34 Twitter followers
• I have 30 connections on LinkedIn

I’m going to presume they have this information stored in a database somewhere and while I’m clearly not James Halliday, I’m also not a hermit. I’m not a hugely powerful wine influencer, but I’m someone they think would be handy to have on their side. In their database I will probably look something like this:

• Name: Matt Granfield
• Property: http://www.e-cbd.com/zakazukhazoo/
• Industry Authority Score: 1/10 (I have very little influence in the wine industry)
• Social Authority: 6/10 (My Facebook and LinkedIn connections are bang on the median, but I have a larger blog following than your average Australian)
• Industry Reach: 0 (I have no obvious wine industry connections)
• Social Reach: 271 (the total number of social media connections I have)

If I like the wine, their stats will tell them that following is likely to happen:

• I will buy 3 bottles each year for the next five years
• Based on my social authority, I will influence 5% of my social reach into buying one bottle each
• Based on my industry authority, I will influence 5% of my industry reach into buying one bottle each

So, presuming the average price of a bottle of wine is $15, and they’ve already sent me 12 of them, you can use the following equation to figure out the value (ROI) of the social media pact I’ve made with Kirrihill:

ROI = 3 x 5 x $15 + 271 x 5 ÷ 100 x $15  + 0 x 5 ÷ 100 x $15 - $15 x 12

ROI = $248.25

So, Kirrihill Wines will make about $248.25 from me this year. That’s not too bad really. Obviously the figures I’ve used are examples, but they’re probably not far off the mark. I’ll report back in 12 months time and let you know if I’m right!

P.S. It’s good to see Kirrihill Wines have taken my advice and put a tear-off tag on the back of their bottles so you can remember what wine you drank. I’m claiming full credit for that one, even if I find out the labels were printed before I mentioned it.

P.P.S I love the packaging, and it’s nice to see they are launching a range of wines called ‘companions’ with a social media marketing campaign. Bloody marvellous work and full credit to Network PR.

Brands like people to have good experiences in association with them. Coke, for example, want to be there when you’re having fun with your friends at the beach. Meat and Livestock Australia want you to come home to a beef casserole after you’ve been playing in the rain with your friends in winter (kudos to MLA and BMF for a great campaign). Marketing departments think that if they can plant their brand into your wonderful memories, they’ll be remembered fondly by association. It works. But there’s also a flip side. If your brand is there when people aren’t having fun, you’re a little bit screwed. Cheap bourbon is reponsible for more ‘first hangovers’ among teenage girls than any other alcoholic beverage in the world (I have no statistical evidence to back that up, but I’ve asked around), which, I dare say, is one of the reasons Jim Beam doesn’t even bother trying to market its product to women.

Imagine then, if your product was scientifically proven to kill and associated by most of the population with death. Don’t get me wrong, this can be a huge advantage, if you are, say, Lockheed Martin, but not so good if you are the maker of a consumer product. Cigarettes will, in fact, kill you. Phillip Morris makes more of them than just about anyone else.

I wouldn’t work in Marketing for Phillip Morris if they paid me $1,000,000 a year, but plenty of people would. For that reason they have some of the most highly-paid marketing executives in the world and they aren’t short on talent. Their brands are associated with death and sickness, but they can’t spin this with advertising, they can’t sponsor anything, they are forced by legislation to put graphic images of the diseases they cause on their products, they won’t show their products in films, people can’t even use them in public and they are taxed heavily by governments. Devising marketing strategies for Phillip Morris would have to be up their on the difficult scale with being the New York PR rep for Al Qaeda.

Virtually the only marketing avenue left to Phillip Morris is online. Even on the vast open plains of the wild world web they’re still doing it tough. Google any cigarette brand and see if you can find an official website with traditional marketing material. You can’t. Check out what they have to do instead. Despite being inside a maximum security marketing prison, somehow, somewhere, sometimes, people still smoke. Millions of them. Despite the best efforts of government health departments to get people to stop, smoking rates in the USA have decreased by a measly 2% a year for the last decade. Pear consumption in Italy could have decreased by that amount an no-one would have noticed.

The best marketing strategy in the world is to make a product that people with elevated social status think is cool. If the cool people have it, everyone else will want it. The second best marketing strategy in the world is to make your product addictive.

I was in Melanesia last week, chiefly to climb a volcano, but also to have a good long chat about marketing strategy with Stuart Mathison, who is the Head of Operations of the National Bank of Vanuatu. Stuart is a client of ours and he’s got a problem. He is responsible for running an (underfunded) government-owned organisation that is duty bound to provide a loss-making service to a rural nation, but he also has to compete for profit in the cities (where the money is) with a bunch of foreign-owned banks that have a virtually limitless PR budget and advertising spend. Stuart has a brilliant brand with some amazing stories (for example, their mobile banking reps travel on speedboats to reach isolated island villages), but in order to get the message out there he’s got to find some innovative and alternate ways of reaching his audience because he hasn’t got the money to compete with ANZ and Westpac. What he is going to do will make an interesting blog post one day, but it’s too early to say too much just yet.

It got me thinking though. The kinds of innovative marketing strategies the National Bank of Vanuatu are going to have to put in place aren’t that different from the kinds of strategies that can be employed by underfunded government organisations around the world. One of those that is quite dear to my heart is Australia’s national youth broadcaster Triple J. When I started this blog I had a long list of things I was going to write about, one of which was going to be a series of posts on how to use digital strategy to market a range of different organisations circa 2008. ‘Bank’ was on that list, and I’ll get there one day, but I think a more interesting post for the moment would be ‘how to market Triple J’.

Triple J is the youth arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, encompassing a national radio station, some TV shows, a magazine and a number of websites. It has a lot of diehard fans and a national audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, but in an era where iPods, online file-sharing and YouTube have become the kids’ tools of choice for finding and experiencing music and entertainment, Triple J’s marketing team has its back against the wall. It needs to fight back, and it needs to change the way it operates.

Triple J’s aim is not to win the ratings war, and it shouldn’t be, but the more people it can reach, the better it will achieve its goals under the ABC charter, namely: encouraging and promoting music and the arts, informing and entertaining the youth of the country and contributing to a sense of national identity that reflects Australia’s cultural diversity. The yardstick shouldn’t be ears listening to any particular radio program or eyeballs viewing a show, it should be how well the organisation achieves its goals. It goes without saying that it has a much better chance of achieving those goals successfully if it can win over people who aren’t currently paying attention.

There are a number of groups of people who aren’t currently paying attention and Triple J’s marketing and branding goals should be to wake them up, they are:

• People who listen to competing stations and consume other competing media
• People who listen to their iPods (and digital radio) instead of FM radio
• People who consume online media instead of magazines and TV
• People who currently listen to Triple J, but not as often as others
• Bands and solo artists

And of course, that’ s not to mention the need to keep existing listeners and viewers informed.

Here’s what I think Triple J should be doing for each of those groups…

People who Listen to Competing Stations and Consume Other Competing Media

No matter how good Triple J’s bumper stickers are (‘It was either this or a Jesus fish’ was one great example), no matter how much media attention the (brilliant) ‘Beat the Drum’ competition gets and no matter how many promos Triple J runs for itself over the airwaves and on ABC TV, it’s not going to make any significant impact on those who are currently listening to competing stations and consuming competing media. For these people, it’s a matter of programming choice and content. The only way you can make them change the dial is to change their taste.

It’s possible to change people’s taste, but it’s hard.

Fashion changes because Hollywood celebrities are paid to wear the latest trends, and the cool people (the trend-setters in their social group) pick up on them. Eventually the styles find their way in to mainstream department stores like Target when managers are comfortable that a style has become middle-of-the-road enough to sell in large quantities, but by the time they do, the cool people have moved on. Music works in much the same way; a few artists out on the cutting edge set the new trend and eventually, mainstream radio picks up on it, but not before something newer and cooler has come along. It’s Triple J’s job to be at that cutting edge, to find the new music and test the waters, and for that reason you’re never going to hear Triple J playing in Target. However, Triple J should be pushing harder to get played in more clothing stores, more cafes, and more shops where the trend-setters are listening. Triple J should be using use social media to reach people like Cam Hill with more innovative approaches – it should be using the cult of celebrity to use its personalities as brand ambassadors who connect directly with their audience. Zan Rowe is doing a great job with her blog, and Marieke Hardy has only recently shut up shop, but a lot more could be done.

Sponsoring gigs and festivals is excellent brand re-enforcement, but I doubt it’s doing much to win over people who aren’t already listening. You still need to preach at the choir, but you need better evangelism if you’re going to reach the masses.

People who Listen to their iPods (and Digital Radio) Instead of FM Radio

Over 150 million iPods have been sold, white earbuds are ubiquitous on public transport and these days even budget car manufacturers are installing MP3 player docks as standard accessories. Record labels have virtually given up trying to fight P2P file sharing and virtual stations like Last.FM, Yahoo Music and MySpace are increasing listenership at astonishing rates. People who know what they are talking about are claiming that music radio is dead.

As music industry commentator Bob Lefsetz put it:

“Radio listenership has been declining for years.  Is it coming back? You now hear about music from your friends.  Or in chat rooms, blogs or other virtual worlds.  Every band known to man has a MySpace site where you can experience its wares … in an era where you can pull up a station’s playlist on the Net, why do you have to actually listen (to the airwaves)…”

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently spoke with some unique insight on  the future of radio as well and it’s well worth reading.

The fact is, Generation Y doesn’t listen to radio like their parents (or even their older cousins) did. They know how to get (almost) every song in the world online for free and if they want to hear something new radio is the last place they need to look. In our office there are nine people and I usually get to work before all of them. As everyone arrives in the morning I watch everyone over 25 tune in their radio and everyone under 25 either plug in their iPod, or cue up MySpace.

FM radio can’t compete with digital media if it wants to reach Generation Y.

The station is lucky it doesn’t have to try and sell ad slots over airwaves to survive; it can innovate and it can do so quickly, long before competitors Austereo and DGM wake up to the stark reality of the situation. Streaming popular shows online is a good start, as is the excellent Unearthed website. But so much more can be done. I’d like to see an audit of the Unearthed website to see how many people are actually streaming music regularly. I’d then like to see what happened if the site was opened up so that artists with record deals could stream their music too. My guess is that if Triple J got serious about streaming more popular music online it would quickly become a market leader and win back those people who stopped listening to traditional FM radio long ago. If Triple J put all Australian music in one spot people wouldn’t need to use MySpace or Last FM as their radio station.

People who Consume Online Media Instead of Magazines and TV

The same principles apply to this group as they do to those people who’ve stopped listening to traditional FM radio. Triple J needs to become a much better digital content aggregator. Heywire and the Triple J forums are great examples, but I’d be curious to look and learn from some figures and see just how effective and popular they have been.

Triple J has to learn that putting  more content from JMag online won’t cannibalise sales of the printed version, they’ll enhance it and increase the reach of the J brand. People still (for the moment at least) want good-quality hard-copy magazines to read on the train, on the bus, on a plane and at the beach. If they want online entertainment they’ll go to YouTube, they won’t bother reading long articles, and if they do go online to read long articles, giving them more of J Mag online will encourage them to buy the next edition of the paper copy next time they’re waiting for that train/bus/plane. I’m willing to be wrong about this, but I’m pretty certain I’m right. Others agree with me.

People who Currently Listen to Triple J, but not as Often as Others

I’ve been listening to Triple J since 1994 when I was 14 years old and it first came to the small town on the NSW South Coast where I grew up. Not once has the ABC asked why. I can’t remember the last time the station did a survey into what their listeners were doing, what else they were listening to and what would make them listen to Triple J more.

Is Triple J sure the current music selection is hitting its mark (I happen to think it is, but they should be asking)? Is there a more appropriate time for a half-hour youth-orientated current affairs program than 5.30pm when the bulk of the nation’s working population are driving home from their jobs and in the mood to relax? Do people want to play the station at work (or in their café or shop) but can’t because their bosses don’t like the swearing? Are kids listening to Triple J in secret because their parents don’t like the content?

People who listen to Triple J ‘a little bit’ are the low-hanging fruit. They’re the ones who are most easily plucked for the richest rewards. The station needs to find out what it can do to make them listen more.

Bands and Solo Artists

Significant airplay on Triple J can make or break an artist’s career – read Wikipedia’s summary on that if you don’t believe me. Bands that get a break on Triple J praise the station loudly and often: Those that don’t criticize its lack of transparency. Artists are potentially the best and most vocal brand ambassadors the station has. They have the power to tell people to listen, watch, and read, so they need to understand how the station’s programming works. As an organistion with enough influence to make (or perhaps break) their dreams, Triple J has a huge responsibility to treat them with care and respect, it shouldn’t be lefty to a third party website like JPlay to be the information disseminator.

The Unearthed website is a brilliant avenue of communication between the 10,000+ listed unsigned artists and the station, but there are so many more bands, singers and songwriters with minor (and major) record and publishing deals achieving success around the country who aren’t eligible to be on the site that have no idea why their music isn’t on Triple J. It’s not reasonable to expect that station management provide individual feedback to every single one of them, but it seems strange that there can’t be an unearthed-style website available for everyone, whether they have signed a piece of paper or not. Every band under the sun streams their music for free at MySpace, Triple J should be providing the same opportunity under its own banner – I’m certain that Australian artists would embrace the Triple J brand, which has done so much for Australian music in the past, over Rupert Murdoch’s multinational goliath. If you could make Triple J the source for online Australian music you would kick every marketing goal under the sun.

While they’re at it, is there any reason why Triple J can’t offer artists the ability to sell their tracks online and take a small commission from the proceeds? Is there a reason Triple J can’t become the iTunes of Australian music and MAKE some money in the precess? I realize there are commercial regulations at play, but if it can sell Hottest 100 CDs, promote music festivals, support tours, promote gigs, sell ads in their magazine and feature albums each week, all of which lead to considerable commercial gain for the parties involved, surely there’s some sort of workaround to helping Australian artists sell their music online? There’s a desperate need out there for a place where independent artists can sell their music (or give away for a donation like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are doing). If you provided that mechanism you’d get every Australian artist on side you’d have a hugely powerful army of brand ambassadors working for you.

Keeping Existing Listeners/Viewers Informed

I won’t go into too much detail about how Triple J can better keep existing listeners and viewers informed because the existing marketing and communication strategies are pretty good. As a media outlet they can do all the internal promotion they like on radio, in print, online and on TV. They could probably do an audit of how many people are reading the emails they send out, what the magazine circulation is, how effective their Facebook and MySpace presence is, what the effective reach of festival and gig sponsorshop is, and what sections of the website are most popular, but I’m presuming all the appropriate tracking mechanisms and metrics are in place and this is a no-brainer.

In Summary

Triple J has done more for the Australian music industry than any other organisation I can think of. Like the National Bank of Vanuatu they have some amazing stories to tell, but they have to compete against some hugely powerful (albeit diminishing) commercial organisations who watch their every move, piggy-back on their successes and then poach their best talent. Triple J should be using its advantage and irreverence to innovate and start staking new ground. I’m not claiming to know the organisation’s needs inside-out, but there’s some little seeds they can start planting now that will in all likelihood grow into much bigger things in years to come.