No Man’s Blog

Recently I found myself thinking about the noisy minority of early adopters and their (not always) latent snobbery and cult or new news. What really makes me tick these days are big brands that get it. It so easy to ‘get it’ when you’re small, young business/brand but somehow the bigger you are the harder it takes you to adopt to change - with exceptions of course.

‘Crossing the chasm’ - a borrowed term that usually used in the context of technology adoption is being used here to describe brands that manage to take the ‘cool’ ideas that comes mostly from web culture and make use of them in a way that not only doesn’t make you want to poke someone eyes out but it actually makes a successful and effective campaign - even if we like to snub it.

Few examples:

Walkers do us a flavour (2008) - yet another crowdsourcing campaign that could have gone un-noticed (or badly wrong) as most big FMCG brands go. But Walkers were very serious about it, treated the campaign as a fully integrated activity- not just as ‘digital’, put the money where the mouth is (pun intended) and created one of the most talked about marketing campaigns of that year.

Dell - one of my favourite brands last year. I was absolutely fascinated by the way they managed to turn from one of the most hated and trashed brands to one of the most respected. Dell put ‘listening’ and real-time customer service at the heart of their business, shifting proper resources to become thought (but more importantly action)-leading, brand on the interweb. Perhaps you need to badly fall on your ass in order to transform your business the way they did.

Starbucks - I don’t ‘like’ Starbucks for the same reasons I don’t like Dell (characterless mass product, if you insist) but with Starbucks Ideas, their story is very similar to Dell. A much loved brand that was going down hill with expansion that rightly threatened both their fans and haterz. Here again is a story of a brand that understood that the web can help you to redefine the relationships between you and the people who care about you. They utilised web culture to get closer to people, to strengthen existing and build new connections with people on and offline.

Burger King - I admire BK for creating a culture of anticipation (what is the next cool shit that they will pull out?) with the drip feeding of small interactive surprises - Xbox Games, Chicken Fight, Posh Converter, Dr Angus, Whopper Sacrifice, The Wopperettes etc. They seem to have develop a desire to experiment and a culture of doing - the culture/process/strategy that more brands should adopt. However, and perhaps this is just an industry insider bias, sometimes it feels like CP+B overshadows BK, if you see what I mean.

Finally the brand that actually ignited this post, T-Mobile. Like all digeratis, when I first saw ‘Dance’ I couldn’t resist snubbing it. I still don’t like it and think it’s the least good of the three. But you can’t argue with 16 million views on youtube. When I curbed my reflex, I couldn’t avoid admiring what they did with singalong -the scale, the surprise and the way they created a story that became advertising assets across all channels. 10,000 people had fuck load of fun and that’s what matters.

And now comes Josh’s Band. Not wholly original, a bit contrived, yes, but I personally think the song is wonderfully catchy (for what it supposed to be, it’s not that i’m gonna have it on repeat on my iPod) and like the 2 prequels, overall T-mobile got truly committed to the idea that marketing should be about doing something with people not just saying something to them. Kudos where deserved etc

c’mon give me more examples…

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