Getting back in touch with customers

A little background: the banking group Dexia (itself a weird name) is a textbook case of mismanagement and over-reaching itself, leading to a very expensive bail-out which generated quite a lot of public resentment. The retail branch in Belgium, however, was both successful and innovative – something the banking sector rarely manages. Its communications (managed by the Boondoggle agency in Leuven) had launched an impressive campaign to get back in touch with its customers. In a way, everything was already in place to create a new dynamic and place the bank strategically close to its customers.

Instead, someone chose the name Belfius.

The new Belfius logo, designed by Hoet&Hoet

Official acronyms and pig Latin

What’s wrong with the name? A lot. At a surface level, Belfius falls into two very uncomfortable categories found frequently in Belgium: the official acronym and pig Latin. Belfius could easily be the name of a government agency, for example – hardly the most attractive solution for an innovative, customer-centric bank. It also sits alongside clunky fake-Latin names such as Proximus, Axion, Fortis and Artesia (the latter three all banks).

The appeal of these names is extremely limited. And unfortunately, Belfius (apparently developed with the help of an agency called Remarkable) combines the lack of appeal of fake-Latin with the grimness of a government agency. How more wrong could the name be?

I’m sure there are reasons behind this such as the need to cut with the past and the need to find a name that works in a trilingual country. But it’s an expensive choice. One advertising executive said that the total cost of re-branding Dexia as Belfius could be between €20-40 million when you factor in all the signage, stationery, websites and advertising. I’d say it will be at the top end of the scale as they will have to employ considerable resources trying to impose a name that people have already rejected.

The real tragedy of the new brand name is that it could have been so different. The new name could have leveraged the work being done by the bank over the past year. as it is, they are starting from less than zero.

Put bluntly, the disconnect between the two is a disaster. Why spend so much time and resources on re-branding if the communications just plod on regardless? Your audience or customers get two different messages. Their expectations are heightened by the brand’s mission statement, but disappointed when trying to actually deal with the company.

Branding is more than a lick of paint

Never forget that the brand perception is what people say of you when you leave the room (or when they visit your website). New graphic charters are important, but they won’t help if the basic communications are wrong.

Simple real-life examples:

• the mission statement talks about cooperation and working together, yet the images on the website or advertising are of single people or – worse – generic images;
• the brand mission talks about innovation, but the site looks like it was built in 1995;
• the brand mission talks about innovation, and the site also talks about innovation. But what does innovation mean? What are the examples? It’s a classic case of “show don’t tell”. Why not inspire your visitors? Make the clients and talented young engineers rush to call you. Ask them for ideas. Copywriting can lay a big role in this – as can interactive applications;
• the mission statement talks about working together, but a genuine contact is hard to find. Don’t overlook these elements, and also the career pages.

Branding is not a lick of paint. It’s something which has to be incorporated at every level of a company. The mission statement, production, communication and HR policies all have to be aligned. Don’t forget to develop an activation plan that covers everything from the copywriting to the signage and service.

Can you think of companies where the alignment works? My clients often mention Apple; what do you think?

Is a greeting card better than an e-card?

I often hear people debating the relative merits of paper cards and e-cards. It usually comes down to a discussion about price. E-cards are faster, cheaper to send and easily customisable. What’s not to like?

Well, how about impact? I remember visiting an office and seeing a paper card I had produced pinned to the wall SIX MONTHS AFTER CHRISTMAS. Compare that to the lifespan of an e-card: roughly 2 seconds. No matter how naff they might be, I always keep paper cards lined up on a shelf for at least a few weeks after Christmas. For me, there is no comparison. Remember also that you usually sign paper Christmas cards, creating a direct human link to the person you are sending it to. Personalise it. Say something nice. Say something simple.

Why not benefit from a seasonal offer?

If there is one thing that is guaranteed to move my finger to the “delete” button, it’s the e-card that comes with a special offer. Is this a sales pitch or seasonal wishes? Make up your mind. Do you send cards to your family and mention in passing that you have an affiliate link at a hotel or a good money-making deal that expires in 72 hours? Why should I be different? Do you think people will react in any other way than to scrub the e-mail?

Separate those messages. A good sales pitch with a special offer is always welcome. Greeting cards that sound like a flaky second-hand car salesman routine I find insulting. And irritating. And clumsy. And amateurish. Are you sure you want that to be the message you are sending?

I was quickly nauseated by all the recent Thanksgiving messages I received with special offers as 1) no-one  celebrates Thanksgiving outside the US (don’t forget to target within your list) and 2) if I wanted to buy an e-mail list/consultancy/software upgrade I’d use Google or Bing, thanks. I wouldn’t buy it from someone that tricked me into reading their message. I want to feel upbeat, not that I’m getting an upsell.

In a word: thanks

So take this opportunity to say thank you, to tell people you think of them occasionally outside the sales cycle, to share a little thought about life or the world. On a more philosophical note, remember that giving is good for your own morale. And the simplest thing we have to offer is thanks.

But typically for our age, this revolution has its corporate sponsor. The tone, the simplicity and the concept of this ad are almost perfect as an exercise in zeitgeist. The cameras are all hand-held. Instead of copywriting, we get the poem “Go Forth” by Charles Bukowski. The images are fleeting, liberating, breathless. The mad aspiration of youth is magically caught in just 60 seconds. It would take a cold heart not to be touched by them.

Could a brand like Levis condone protest?

Released in August 2011, could Levis have known there would be so many riots (referenced several times in the clip) and the importance they would play? I doubt it very much. Could Levis be seen to condone – even implicitly – the Arab Spring, the London riots, the Occupy movement or Madrid’s Indignants? Whatever the merits of these movements, the answer is clearly “no”.

There are limits, as Levis found. The spot, released a week after the London riots, was promptly banned in the UK. The timing, clearly, was off. But was the intention? Do we think this is appropriate?

How do you define your clout?

If you are active at all in the social media (and there’s a strong chance you are if you are reading this), you must have a fair idea about what you are doing. But how do you rate your time spent on, say, Twitter? When it appeared, Klout struck me as a fun gimmick. It gave some metrics to what was then a very fuzzy domain.

But there is a very strong danger that it becomes a goal in itself. The very human temptation is to play the badge game, amassing thousands of followers and sending out a dizzy number of Tweets and RTs to boost the ratings.  And then? What do you do with a following with which you have no meaningful connection? Is there not a better way to measure clout?

Keeping up with the Joneses

If you have to use it as a measure of success in the social sphere, you are on very thin ice. What is the practical difference between a Klout of 61 and 63 in absolute terms? The only practical use I can think of for Klout is as a relative yardstick. At the very most, I would present a rating in the context of your three closest competitors. Here’s where we are compared to X, Y and Z. And if everyone actually went down, a drop on your side is not unusual.

On a practical level, it strikes me that a review of Klout’s rating system was not out of order, given the massive changes in the social world since it started. But hopefully you are also using more precise data-driven metrics such as those available from Hootsuite or others.

Allowing yourself to receive

To answer my own question, I can think of a good handful of strong contacts made on Twitter, almost daily exposure to sensational data and comment and an overall healthy rate of RTs across the various accounts I am involved with. Thinking that I have “clout” demonstrates the wrong mindset, as social media is not a macho thing. As has often been pointed out, it’s the two-way flow of data and comment that is important.

Instead of asking how much I have pumped into the Infobahn today, it might be an idea to ask how much I have allowed myself to receive. The ability to spot trends, understand comment or analysis and pick up leads is, for me, a key element of social media – ones that feeds the other parts of my work.

Why choose between SEO and copywriting when you can do both?

If you’re writing for a website, 95% of the time you are thinking about attracting and keeping readers on the page long enough to do something. Unless your client has very large budgets to play with, attracting readers will inevitably mean being spotted in search engines.

I love good SEO. It’s not my specialty, so I won’t presume to talk about it here. But if you are an SEO writer, here are a few tips you can use to bring your website’s pages one step further through a more marketing-minded approach to the copywriting:

* make the process specific to your customer. Don’t talk about the benefits of widgets. It’s Your Customer’s widgets that do the trick. We don’t need another generic description of a service or technology. The web is full of content farms and scraped texts stuffed with keywords. Put your customer’s name out front!
* be more specific in subheads. A subhead that says “Benefits for everyone” is useless for two reasons. It doesn’t help diagonal reading and doesn’t help with SEO. Subheads are h2 or h3. So make them useful: “Your Customer’s laser technology provides benefits for patients and doctors”. “Visitors to Brussels benefit from enhanced travel services”. This brings me to another point:
* add local information where appropriate to help SEO. If your customer only has one or two offices, use that to localize the SEO. “Patients in Paris and Amsterdam appreciate integrated service”.

Now that you’ve run over the text and made it that bit more effective, I have one last copywriting tip:

* make it personal. Go back and read the text as if it was you that was going to book that flight, nose-job or insurance plan. Make the text a little warmer, more real, more from the inside. How? Well, use all the information you received in the brief concerning demographics, the competition and above all motivation.

These simple copywriting guidelines can already significantly improve the SEO copywriting of any website. If you have any further tips, I’d certainly love to hear them in the comment section below!

XXXX Airshow: an exhibition where aircraft are sold!

Not exactly the strongest headline I’d ever seen. But I am interested and continued:

- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -

XXXX AirShow 2011: International Exhibition of General Aviation

- Press Release- June 30th, 2011

Please find enclosed the June 30th Press Release for the XXXX AirShow 2011.

To this was attached a Word document containing the event’s facts and figures, but also a non-clickable URL. Argh! I don’t know where to start with how wrong this is. But ultimately, I wonder what they were trying to achieve.

As I run websites, I often use news items. So why not simply paste the actual news in the message body? I could then read it quickly, see if I’m interested, cut’n paste if necessary and post to the site. Why use a separate Word document without letting me know what it contains?  Something tells me their open rates are pretty low.

Remember that increasing numbers of people are mobile and might be paying international roaming rates to download something which could be either text-based or on a site.

Mail shots: focus on the click

The same principle applies when you are copywriting and sending e-mail shots. You have to live with the fact that e-mail messages do not sell products or services. They serve to prepare me for the sales pitch. They act as a qualifier, and should provide just enough information to allow me to decide if I want to click through. That is it. Graphics are nice. The copy can be cute. But keep it short and simple if you want my click. And remember to let people know what to expect. At over 100 e-mails per day, most businesspeople don’t have much time for teasers.

Applying these principles can kick up e-mail click-through rates substantially.

Now, how about a little experiment? Every time you click through from an e-mail message this week, go back to it later and ask yourself what clinched it for you. Why did you bother in this case? You’ll probably be surprised how concise and effective the good e-mails really are.

Are there any tips you can pass on for writing e-mails, or insights into what happens when they arrive in your inbox?

What do you do when looking for potential partners?

If you’re like me, you inspect their website to see who they are, what exactly they do and what their current priorities are. When asked to list their company’s activities, a surprising number of people tick ALL the boxes. So we’re supposed to believe they are producers, distributors, video production companies, publishers, composers and managers that also do licensing and soundtrack supervision. Yeah, right.

A quick look at their website will tell you what they actually do to pay the rent, which is more useful. Why the confusion? Although the companies probably have a fair idea of why they are attending a trade fair, why don’t they think it through and tell the other participants clearly what they have and what they want? Small companies often say they don’t have the time to work on their websites. But bigger companies are just as bad at targeting their events for other reasons.

So here are four simple steps to focusing your trade fair communications.

1. It might seem obvious, but it’s worth sitting down with a partner to list your top three priorities, such as “finding licensors for our work”, “finding material to release locally” and “hooking up with a mobile platform”. Now go and look at your company website. Is it clear what your priorities are? And what you have to offer? How recent is the latest news?
2. Update and adapt your website to clearly tell people that you are attending – and why. If your website is both for consumers and business, create a dedicated page with the key points to get across.  A page I created for the Cannes Festival 2009 continues to get direct hits due to the keywords (needless to say I have since updated it to reflect current priorities). When sending out e-mails, create a signature that links directly to this page rather than the homepage.
3. Check and re-check all data entered into the event database. I’d say about 10% of e-mail addresses in event databases bounce due to having being badly spelled. Check them once. Check them twice. And check all the websites you mention.
4. Make sure you keep pounding out Twitter (using the right hashtags) and Facebook announcements leading up to the events. Be consistent, be specific and ask for people to get in touch. Link to your business page. Never mind that people don’t answer; you only need a handful of good connections to make a trade fair an astounding success. And nothing attracts attention like success.

So take the time. You’ll find it helps focus any marketing you are doing and creates a loop that will attract the right sort of contacts. If you have questions about communication at trade fairs, call on our copywriting and experience.

The Write Stuff has specialised in trade fairs for 15 years, providing marketing and copywriting services, as well as business development during trade fairs. For 7 years, it developed marketing campaigns for Midem,  Mipcom, Mip Junior, MipTV, Mipim Asia as well as finding names for Mipim Horizons and Amazia.

CV authentication

Interesting to see that our customer CVTrust has picked up an award as “entrepreneur of the year” from the Belgian organisation Enterprize. We were called in to work on the website before it was launched. The service enables job seekers to authenticate their CVs once and for all in one place. Recruiters save time and money by dealing with CVs that are already  approved and therefore more trustworthy. Another win-win situation.

We could have gotten pretty in-depth on this, as it is an innovative concept. But the client – and needless to say The Write Stuff – were anxious to keep the copywriting as concise and effective as possible. So it was a case of working hard to make it easy to read and use.

Incidentally, if you’re not looking for a job the site can also be used to validate customer quotes.

Car manufacturer Aston Martin (photo) came out tops. But I’d like to fast-forward to a thought that struck me.

A look at the top 20 brands reveals a few interesting nuggets. No less than 9 are the names of people: Aston Martin, Bang & Olufsen, Harley-Davidson, Ferrari, Dom Pérignon, Viviane Westwood, Chanel, Alexander McQueen and Jimmy Choo. There are three “I” names: iPhone, iPod and BBC’s iPlayer (I’m sure Apple are kicking themselves for not trademarking that one!). Four are descriptive: iPhone, iPlayer, Mini and, arguably, YouTube. And lastly, only one acronym is in there, and even that is part of a fuller name, BBC iPlayer. It’s also worth noting that only one of the makey-uppy names that are so fashionable these days makes it into the top 20: Google.

Choose your brand name carefully

If you’re launching a consumer product, I can only repeat how careful you should be in finding a name that has legs – one that will be able to walk tall. The Superbrand review is not a scientific analysis of branding. And there is also more to branding than the name; don’t forget superior products, great positioning and a marketing budget! But it certainly provides a little food for thought if you’re thinking of launching a new brand.

The “cool” factor is not the only one to bear in mind (RyanAir does not need it to be successful, for example). But the results do echo The Write Stuff’s experience using our naming methodology. The names that survive the process are names that enable marketers to build on the connotations and emotions that are relevant to their audiences – and this is as valid for paint as it is for a petrochemical product.

More about product naming and research