Fixing Rep Of A Brand That's Too Big To Fail

Johnson & Johnson's handling of the cyanide-laced Tylenol crisis of 1982 is required reading for every business school marketing and public relations course. A bizarre and terrifying case of sabotage that ended up claiming the lives of seven Chicago residents, the Tylenol murders could have decimated the company. But an effective and compassionate public relations strategy saved J&J, and paved the way for its reputation as a reliable and respected brand. As recently as 2008, Johnson & Johnson topped Barron's list of most-respected companies. In PR circles, this is the stuff of legend.

Fast-forward to 2011, and the company's reputation has become anything but legendary. Over the past two years, Johnson & Johnson has recalled more than 200 million individual products, from over-the-counter meds to surgical sutures and syringes, costing more than $900 million in lost revenue. News that broke this week indicates that J&J has now agreed to pay $70 million to settle civil and criminal complaints of bribing doctors in Europe and paying kickbacks to the Iraqi government to illegally obtained business.

Most distressing is the company's PR response to these ongoing troubles. The same Johnson & Johnson that was so progressively out in front of the 1982 crisis is now paying consultants to buy questionable products from store shelves rather than institute a recall, and is positioning various product problems as isolated incidents related to conditions at the manufacturing plants, not corporate governance. Can consumers continue to trust a company that acts in these ways?

Too Big to Fail?

Yet, for all of its quality control problems and recent PR mishandling, Johnson & Johnson will likely weather this particular storm, and continue to be one of the foremost names in pharma and consumer products. In PR terms, it may be a brand that's simply too big to fail.

Proving itself as a company with its own crisis management creation myth (circa 1982) goes a long way toward explaining its resilience. Good, effective PR is in its DNA, and more importantly, lodged in the consciousness of its loyal consumers. Recent missteps aside, J&J will compose an appropriate response to its consumer-related challenges, and emerge from this string of recalls and product questionability as a company willing to dialogue with the public and address issues transparently. CEO William Weldon's response to the bribery settlement ("We ... have taken full responsibility for these actions") is a baby step in the right direction. The company's March announcement that the FDA will have expanded oversight of three of its subsidiary manufacturing plants is a bigger step.

We've Seen This Before

It's true that a brand that has staked so much on its reputation has much to lose in situations like the one J&J finds itself in. But it's also true that brands as large as J&J -- even ones without a similar PR aura -- are likely to survive such situations in today's public relations environment, particularly in relation to corporate corruption. Siemens, the global engineering conglomerate, paid record fines for bribery in 2008, and yet is still among the world's largest and most recognizable brands. Computer Associates underwent a similar corporate fraud investigation in 2004, and although that company's CEO pleaded guilty to federal charges, the brand itself is as strong as ever. And BP's 2010 Gulf of Mexico nightmare? It's almost as if it never happened.

To continue reading, click here.

Let Them Eat Cake

I want to support bloggers, really I do. After all, their time is money and their contributions are valuable. They feed the content beast - never mind that we also need them in PR circles.

Like the HuffPost bloggers, I contribute to a number of online publications - MediaPost and Mobile Marketer being the most prominent - and I know that my columns attract decent attention most of the time. And like the HuffPost bloggers, I also entered into an "unwritten" agreement with these publications that my contributions would go unpaid. In return, I would receive increased recognition, credibility and traffic to my site.

Sounds like a rather fair and attractive deal, doesn’t it?

It was for the Huffpost blogger army (who very happily contributed and blogged and posted for FREE), until Ms. Huffington scored a massive payola from AOL earlier this year. Since then, the unpaid contributors have decided that their arrangement wasn’t such an attractive and good deal after all.

So what’s the first thing you do in the United States when you think you’ve been untreated fairly - or change your mind, or find an ambulance-chasing lawyer? File a class action law-suit of course!

Whether the unpaid bloggers “revolt” and $195million class-action lawsuit will gain any more traction remains to be seen. I personally find it ridiculous that the bloggers feel they are entitled to part of AOL’s payment for the Huffington Post. Ego-tripping more like.

Whilst I haven’t heard Arianna scream out “let them eat cake,” yet, sounds to me like they want their cake and to eat it as well.

Good luck with that.

Why Baby Boomers Matter for Luxury Marketers

Today, I'm re-posting an article by Elizabeth Zelesny from Luxury Daily as it addresses a topic near to my heart - mobile! (And because in it, Ms. Zelesny most graciously chose to quote me.)

Luxury brands and retailers are preparing for the future by targeting young, affluent consumers with their marketing initiatives. But when it comes to luxury spending via mobile and online, what about the baby boomers?

Although the times are changing, and many in the young, affluent Generation Y consumers are spending as much as the baby boomer generation, it is still important for luxury brands to target the older market. Luxury marketers must understand the unique desires and differences between both the under 40-year-olds and over, especially in the mobile space and online.

“I think it’s incredibly important for luxury brands to target baby boomers via mobile because it’s such a perfect demographic,” said Lauren DeLisa Coleman, a New York-based socio-political digitalist and president of Punch Media Group.

“Here you have a population which turned 46- to 64-years-old in 2010, thus typically more affluent than their younger counterparts and in a better economic position, at least in theory, to actually purchase rather than aspire to luxury brands.

“Younger boomers are also making more and more smartphone purchases, so it’s a beautiful way to engage them on a platform that is always on,” she said.

Boomer consumers
Baby boomers were the first television generation and, later, the first PC generation. Now, they are mobile users.

This demographic uses technology differently than younger generations and luxury marketers need to understand their digital habits.

A new report by eMarketer titled “Digital lives of Boomers: Reaching them Online,” found that 78 percent of boomers are online, when is nearly 60 million adults.

Even as the baby boomer luxury consumers numbers decline, the eMarketer report said the penetration rate will remain high through 2015.

According to the report, the baby boomers control more than $2 trillion in annual spending.

Boomers spend more time and money online than any other demographic.

Young boomers, ages 47-55, spend about an average of 40 hours per month online, according to eMarketer.

Older boomers, ages 56-65, averaged only slightly less, at 36 hours per month online.

This is vital information for luxury brands and retailers because it is not just the tech-savvy, Generation Y consumers buying high-end products via mobile and online.

The baby boomer generation is tech-savvy, too. And they shop online.

Forrester Research reported that boomers spend an average of about $650 online over a three-month period in 2010, compared with $581 by Generation X Internet users ages 35-46 and $429 by Generation Y consumers, ages 18-34.

Baby bloomers
Boomers may be slower to embrace mobile applications than their early-adopter counterparts, but as the smartphone matures, the baby boomer generation has come around to the power of both mobile applications and the mobile Web.

“Media makes fun of boomers being slow adopters of tech, but that’s not generally true,” said Vanessa Horwell, chief visibility officer of ThinkInk, Miami Beach, FL.

“The generally accepted wisdom of effective apps applies to boomer appeal as well: ease of use, attractive, responsive and intuitive interface, relevance and utility and a low or free, download price point all resonate with boomers and users in general,” she said.

“An app that telegraphs its utility – particularly if it’s a branded app – will gain the most traction with this lucrative market.”

Many luxury brands have developed mobile applications in which a game is involved. These marketers, it would seem, are targeting the younger affluent consumers.

How should luxury brands target the older consumers with their mobile applications?

To continue reading Ms. Zelesny's article at Luxury Daily, click here.

Original News and Quality Reporting Doesn't Come For Free

While the bloggers over at the Huffington Post are still bitching about not getting paid for their opinions, The Washington Post featured a great article last week that shatters myths about the future of journalism and supports why quality news and journalistic content should not be free.

I’ve always been a strong proponent of paid-for content – we pay for everything else that we need, value and want. Quality news and content should be no different.

Case in point? The Daily.

Despite many pooh-poohing The Daily when it first came out on the iPad, it represents – to me at least – the future of news and digital journalism for our always connected and ADD-stricken minds. Engaging, entertaining, easy to digest and instantly-gratifying, The Daily creates an experience while delivering news and information of value easily. The New York Times would be wise to take a lesson or three from The Daily’s playbook.

Back to The Washington Post’s article, Five myths about the future of journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, debunks the following myths:

1. The traditional news media are losing their audience.
2. Online news will be fine as soon as the advertising revenue catches up.
3. Content will always be king
4. Newspapers around the world are on the decline.
5. The solution is to focus on local news.

Other news organizations struggling to define their relevance and revenue models should also take note.

My take is that over the next 18-24 months, we’re going to see a significant shift in attitude when consumers finally recognize that you pay for what you get.

If you want quality news and reporting, not regurgitated word-vomit, you will have to pay for it.

The News That Made Us Think (Ink)

Last month, ThinkInk released The ThinkInk Review, a collection of insights and commentaries on topics that changed PR, media, marketing and our world in 2010.

Looking back on 2010, it seems that while the media roller-coaster moved at break-neck speed, unemployment rates and business was painfully stuck on pause. On the positive side, it was a year of reinvention for those who were unsatisfied with putting up with the status quo any longer. In other words, a year full of paradoxes.

It was also a year steamrolled by a perpetual news cycle, incessant Twitter feeds and the sharing of useless information, Apple, Facebook and more Facebook, and a collectively skewed perspective characterized by fear and hopelessness, as evidenced by the most divisive political climate this country has seen in decades. All of these factors played their part in shaping our media landscape, the way we devour our information, and our trust of what we hear, see and read.

The ThinkInk Review is a varied collection of my reactions and responses to many of the events that shaped our world in 2010, from a PR and media perspective. Some of these events (Wikileaks anyone?) will continue to shape our lives in 2011 and beyond, while others may fade into the pages of our collective history with far less fanfare. But in one way or another, they have all had an impact.

The collection is available for download here - The ThinkInk Review. And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to comment below.

What rock ’n’ roll can teach us about mobile and social marketing

I was watching the Grammys a couple of months ago, and as I sat through the usual clumsy award show mash-up of acts, I could not help but think that the more important event took place earlier that day.

It was not nearly as famous or well publicized, but it spoke more directly to the future of music and marketing than the Grammys ever could.

The event I am referring to was “The Social Media Rock Stars Summit — Music and Mobile: Beyond the Ringtone.”

American ideal
Billed by the Recording Academy as a “milestone conversation,” the Summit featured celebs and luminaries from both the music and social media industries exploring the relationship between music and mobile beyond the well-established and somewhat over ringtone and individual track download.

Adam Lambert and Chamillionaire took the stage to discuss how mobile devices have altered the way consumers interact with music, how artists can connect with fans through mobile apps and social media and how the music industry can embrace the new mobile world.

It turns out we can learn more from these stars than how to apply eyeliner and sport bling.

In all seriousness, savvier musicians have been climbing all over mobile to advance their careers and connect with their fans, proving that mobile marketing is not just for the retail industry.

If rock stars can market themselves via mobile, then so can other entities.

The moral of the story – and what I took away from the Social Media Summit – is that even if you do not have the publicity machinery enjoyed by recording artists, you can still apply some 21st-century rock star principles to engage audiences and keep them up to date with what is happening.

You do not have to trash a suite at the Chateau Marmont to generate mobile buzz.

Continue reading the article at Mobile Marketer here

Knowledge Rules When It Comes to Social Media

Last month, just after the SXSW festival in Austin, I read a column by Eric Schwartzman on Spinfluencer. My first reaction was “I wonder if I’d have missed The Strokes’ set to sit on this panel?” closely followed by “No, probably not, but it seems interesting nonetheless.” But blogging about it definitely beats listening to the Stokes new album again, so here goes…

Schwartzman raises an interesting – and I think valid – namely that by “outsourcing” the minutiae of social media maintenance, companies are ceding most of the efficacy of the channel. His position is that social media is a bilateral pipeline direct to consumers, and that a company that allows a PR, marketing or advertising agency manage that pipeline, then the social media strategy becomes anemic. No agency, argues Schwartzman, can know as much about a company’s products or services as the employees of that company, who by the way, are more invested in the company’s survival than any agency might be. He goes further (a bit too far, really) to say that agencies that tout their social media capabilities as an inducement to land clients are behaving unethically.

While I agree with the principle behind Schwartzman’s argument: in order for a social media strategy to be effective, it must be predicated on a give-and-take of information, and to be truly valuable, that information must be sound. And going through the social media motions does not deliver any discernable benefit – just ask the thousands of enterprises out there with double- to low-triple-digit Twitter followers or Facebook fans that keep posting or tweeting banal, self-serving bits of nothing, ignoring comments, and scratching their heads over why their brand engagement isn’t skyrocketing now that they have a handle and a fan page. Of course, if these companies are relying on a third-party agency to execute this limp strategy, they’ve made a drastically irresponsible choice in agency.

Which brings me to my real point…

It’s the knowledge behind the social media strategy that matters, not who signs the paycheck of the person executing it.

Yes, a company employee may have more insight into the company’s core business than an agency representative might, but that’s not an inherent quality. Schwartzman may be writing from his own experience, but with all due respect, mine differs significantly.

My agency delivers social media solutions to clients, but we pride ourselves on having both the industry and client-specific knowledge to make those solutions effective. Yes, that means personalized attention. Yes, that means making sure that every one of our agency staffers tweeting on behalf of a client knows at least as much about the client’s operations as whatever internal intern they might have charged with maintaining the Twitter feed were we not their agency.

And yes, all of that means a little more investment in our clients than the big agencies might be willing to make.

I’d go so far as to say there are plenty of agencies like mine out there that understand the power of social media marketing and are dedicated to getting it right.

Or maybe there aren’t, in which case my email is right at the bottom of this post.