Bank Holiday Cream Teas

It's a Bank Holiday Weekend in the UK. Wooohooooo.  Even one that might be passably nice and not a total wash out. Result.  So as floods of people head for the M5, some for Devon, some for Cornwall, it seemed only fitting to ask two key questions about that key kick back and enjoy holiday pass time: The cream tea.

1) Do you sit in the "scohn" (rhymes with John) or "scooone" (rhymes with Joan) camp?

2) Are you jam first then cream (the Cornish way) or cream first then jam (Devon-stylee)

Big smiles to small but perfectly formed Cornish casual clothes player Saltrock for kicking off a scone wars debate on their website and on Facebook for coming up with a great way to stimulate conversation that is relevant to their origins, can keep spinning over time and which only as a by-product happens to sell you stuff.  (And by the way they have a big conscience too, using organic cotton and other eco-friendly materials and production techniques so you can feel good about wearing their stuff on many levels!).

Roll up, roll up, place your clicks here....

Vote for the Cornish cream tea here or

Vote for the Devon cream tea here

Big shout to Jonathan H for flagging this up to me. Thank you!

Talking horses and breakfast cereal

Nod of hat to my buddy Mr J Willshire of Feedingthepuppy for tipping me off about a new ad / video from breakfast cereal Weetabix.  Ok, it stretches the boundaries of credibility a bit but it's an engaging piece of story telling and it doesn't hammer you over the head with branding / product  messaging upfront.  It doesn't need to, everyone in the UK knows what Weetabix is, and the agency / brand team have clearly grasped this, so I have no hesitation in applauding.

 

There's a time and a place for product benefit messages and there's a time and a place for brand activity that engenders conversation and positive sentiment.  Lots of brands are having a hard time getting their heads around this as it goes against years of TV-lead brand building advertising, known GRP's and ad decay curves.

Moving forward in the conversation space is not about throwing the brand baby out with the bathwater nor abandoning brand building altogether, it's about understanding how to balance brand equity activity that delivers recall, awareness, goodwill and conversation currency with activity that delivers sales.

Ongoing happiness thanks to Fiat 500C

Yup, as predicted in my original post about the Fiat 500c Happiness playlist on Spotify, 2 months later I'm still regularly listening to it, albeit I've also recently added some other "shortcuts" from Sharemyplaylists.com. I'm also looking increasingly fondly at the Fiat 500's I see around and about and whilst changing my Mini is on the cards, trading it for an even smaller boot really isn't practical so it's just going to have to be unrequited love, for now at least.

They ended up with 2498 submissions to their playlist (double click it and then double click within Spotify, & get in touch if you are in a Spotify market and would like an invite) which is not bad for a week long campaign. Then, having got people to engage with them, thumbs up for having twigged the importance of follow up in relationships. They emailed me just a few weeks later about their BIG SMILE event. Sadly I was away and couldn't make it, but they've been smart enough to put photos up on their website:

Then yesterday, I got a tweet announcing the voting is open for the Fiat 500C Top 50 feelgood tracks. More ongoing reasons for me to engage with the brand (I duly voted of course).

Shortcuts within shortcuts. Makes a huge amount of sense given Spotify's recent release of the iPhone and Android app. I'm looking forward to adding the Fiat 500C top 50 happy tracks playlist soon.

Bitesize is good on mobile. Especially given the purported short-ness of battery life for iPhone 3GS.

I'm looking forward to my next Fiat 500C smile-instigator.

Still delighted by Caffe Nero

Last week I wrote about a Caffe Nero promotion that made me happy.

They're giving away a free coffee per week (for 4 weeks) at the Caffe Nero branch at my mainline train station to the holders of the mini-voucher-booklet they were giving out.


So having enjoyed my free coffee last week, I went back today wielding my voucher to be greeted by a smiling barrista who even tried to convince me that perhaps I'd like a larger size of coffee than the small one I ordered.

I enquired as to how redemption levels were this week (week 2) and he said they were good, and about level with last week. Good for them. That's a lot of happy people who might go back again after the end of the 4 week promotional period for the price of 4 free cups of coffee at cost. Rather a lot cheaper than a print ad, and very precisely targeted. Rather a lot of consumers who might tell their friends about Caffe Nero too.

Good stuff.

Missing tricks

Day 2 of the Tube strike, so another walk to and from work for me and many of the other 3 million commuters that usually use the underground network before 9.30am. Everyone knows that Britons love a crisis to bring people together and to give them something to whinge about. For the last two days the commuting community have been united in a common inconvenience.

So where were the brands capitalising on the opportunity to get people to talk?

I spend a lot of time evangelising about the power of the voice of the people, the need to leverage people's personal influence networks and how brands need to be creating conversation currency. Yet here was an opportunity staring everyone in the face, an event that everyone knew was likely to happen, bar last minute strike settlement, and yet as I walked down Oxford Street yesterday did I see a single enterprising coffee shop seeking to add a moment of surprise and delight to the drudge of a disrupted morning? Any brands trying to bring a smile to someone's face by giving them a positive brand experience they could go on to talk about? No. Nient. Nada.

Sunscreen brands, drinks brands, cereal bar brands, blister-care products, I can think of endless mainstream products and brands that could have capitalised on the hundreds of extra people walking past their retailers. 2 days running. But no....

The best I can offer up, and I laud them for doing so, is Confused.com (the price comparison site) who at least took the initiative this morning to pay someone to stand outside Paddington station armed with this banner and an A-Z to help the lost and perplexed.

It won't have cost them much and I bet I wasn't the only one that noticed. Experiences such as these can interrupt and interject a message and leave a favourable impression.

That might mean someone mentions what they saw / your brand name to their friends and colleagues as a result. It might mean that they shared a Twitpic. Irrespective of the form it takes, that's what I call conversation currency. It can be triggered by all manner of things, BIG or small. Offline or online. But it might well mean that subconsciously or consciously those consumers go on to add your brand name into their brand / service consideration set at a later point in time when an appropriate need arises.

So when these tactical opportunities arise, carpe diem should be a brand's mantra.