Stern, clean tech and the role for marketing

The conclusions of the Stern Report are frightening by anyone's standards:

• a 2˚C rise in temperature could mean 4 billion people suffering water shortages
• it would mean 40% of species facing extinction
• it could lead to a further 200 million people going hungry
• if we don't do something very serious, very soon (ie now) climate change could shrink global economies by 20%

And this is just the beginning.

The catalogue of doomsday predictions goes on and on (and is nothing new). In some ways this is part of the problem – while it's paramount to convey the urgency of the situation but at the same time many people feel overwhelmed. There's a learned helplessness creeping in. Vox pop surveys routinely return comments to the effect of "What does it matter whether I recycle, it's just a drop in the ocean..."

There are, of course, no easy answers. An effective response must be holistic and global. One part (although certainly not the whole) is technology. "Clean technology" offers increasing options to mitigate some of the problems and potentially eliminate others. And with the pace of change, it has to be one of the most exciting areas in technology at this moment.

It also provides some of the most challenging tasks for marketers. All too often marketing and communications are characterised as the 'fluffy' end of business that spins empty promises and half truths for a fast buck. Well, here is the chance to bury that accusation once and for all.

Clean tech adoption is about changing behaviour (whether at consumer, business or government level). This is what talented marketing professionals do best. All too often the language of climate change is the language of academic or political debate (of the worst kind). It quickly descends into hair-splitting and plausible deniability. What a great way to disengage people.

What's needed is a language of hope and possibility. One that counters helplessness and offers a vision for the future that brings the issue alive, stirs people into action and, yes, creates profitable businesses for the clean tech industry.

To me, this sounds like the kind of thing many in our industry were born to do.

The end of loyalty?

The subject of customer loyalty is guaranteed to get the attention of virtually anyone involved in marketing. The cost of acquiring new customers always massively outweighs the cost of retaining existing ones (although sadly retention is still given too little meaningful attention by too many companies). And with so many technologies approaching parity, switching brands has never been easier.

Of course, exactly what marketers mean by loyalty is often a somewhat fuzzy idea. Generally it comes down to a desire for existing customers to carry on doing what they're already doing (with a hope that they may do a little more too). As a result, many 'loyalty programmes' use classic behaviourist ideas of rewarding desired behaviour and habitual repeat buying. This is fine when we're talking about getting some points on a store card for buying sugar but doesn't stand up to anything more complicated than simple reflex purchases. This is because it is focused almost solely on habits of mind rather than anything deeper (what academics term 'routinised response behaviour').

A truer definition of customer loyalty is whether people will wait for your product if it is out of stock (or still in beta). Whether they will recommend it to their friends (or blog favourably about it). And whether they'll forgive you when you make mistakes.

But in a 2.0 world is anyone really 'loyal' to brands anymore (especially in the tech sector)? Loyalty is, to some degree, a measure of permanence. Yet as we all know, technology is about relentless change. The technology graveyard is littered with the remains of brands and products that at one time attracted many loyal users. And we are potentially seeing a new wave of change with the move to webOS-based services.

It was unthinkable at one time that Sony Playstation users might defect instead of waiting for the next version. Yet right now the brand's position seems more precarious than ever as PS3's release date and availability moves ever farther away and the competition gets its act together.

Likewise, until Firefox came along, Internet Explorer had effectively won the browser war. Sadly, having won, there was no need to remain focused on improving the product (ie better serving users) and, from a technology standpoint, Microsoft has been playing catch up ever since.

Even Apple, one of the more bomb-proof tech brands, only had to have a few scratched Nanos and discolouring MacBooks to see once 'loyal' customers fall out of love with the brand.

One reason for this is that there is no habit of mind for most technology purchases. They are two infrequent, too expensive and the next purchase is almost never a like-for-like replacement of an older product (tech moves on too quickly). Buyers are also more informed than ever before (and far less scared of technology than they used to be). They are more willing to adopt earlier because on the whole the consequences of getting it wrong aren't too worrying.

So where does this leave marketers?

The first thing to do is turn the whole loyalty question on its head. Instead of asking how loyal your customers are to you, ask how loyal you are to your customers. What can you do to help them get through their day? What would you do if you really were on their side? Find ways to be loyal to them (their wants, needs and aspirations) between purchases.

Secondly, involve customers in refining existing products and developing new ones. Work as partners with them. The open source ethos of co-creation comes into play here. If customers have some skin in the game then they are more likely to stay the course.

Finally, never, ever compromise on support. For most tech companies, this is the prime communication customers have with the brand between purchases. Yet examples of great support are considerably rarer than those of diabolical support. There is no faster way to squander hard earned brand equity than to deliver a crappy support experience.

So is loyalty dead? Yes and no. Traditional notions of brand loyalty are, in the tech sector at least, gasping their last breaths. But in their place could come a more authentic, more effective relationship with customers.

Yahoo! Time Capsule

This is rather lovely. Yahoo! has worked with Jonathan Harris to create a digital time capsule. The capsule is open for 30 days ending 8th November and allows Yahoo! users to contribute content (written, photographic, video, audio) under 10 broad categories. After this date, the resulting capsule will be will be 'sealed' and entrusted to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings based in Washington.

The capsule's creator explains:

The aesthetic of the Time Capsule is that of a ball of thread, spinning like a globe, its shifting surface entirely composed of words and pictures submitted by people around the world. The thread ball concept relates to threads of memory and threads of time, where threads are taken to be any continuous and self-consistent narrative strand. When the Time Capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The ten themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it. Using a search interface, viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City”, and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”. There are an infinite number of ways to slice the data, and each resulting slice then becomes its own thread, which can be browsed independently, tile by tile, like a filmstrip.

Jonathan Harris specialises in creating wonderfully evocative digital experiences. They tend to have a touch of whimsy about them. They are also addictively compulsive with beautifully intuitive interfaces. If you haven't already, be sure to check out 10x10 and we feel fine (as well as his other work here).

5 things to do about Web 2.0 right now

So you've heard about the technologies, you've read a few blogs, and watched something hilariously funny on YouTube – but from a marketing perspective, what should you actually be doing about Web 2.0? And where do you start?

Sometimes it can seem as though unless you immediately launch a blog, put up a wiki, tag all your content and host an unconference, you're being left in the dust. But there are some relatively simple things you can begin doing right now.

1: Hear the conversation

Go to Technorati and set up a watchlist to track blog mentions of your company, your products and key team members (eg your CEO, your CIO etc). Do the same for your competitors.

2: Join the conversation

Begin to engage with those who post about your brand and market. Nominate people internally who can talk passionately (and helpfully) about the industry. Give them the freedom to be themselves.

3: Cultivate advocates

Consider giving prolific posters more privileged access to your company. Invite them in, show them around, drink tea together. Don't merely spin the company line to them. Don't PR them. Don't try to place product on their blogs. Find out where they are coming from, get to know them better. Then as stuff happens, keep the conversation going with them to give your perspective on events.

4: Think community

Look for opportunities to bring groups of customers together to work with you. This might be to develop new products and services, it could be to open new ways of communicating with them, or it could be any number of other ways to collaborate. Importantly, this is not a 'seminar' or a 'showcase'. The best model for this is the BarCamp series of events and the Yahoo! Open Hack Day.

5: Bring a little 2.0 to your site

Start to look at how you can use some of the Web 2.0 technologies on your corporate site. This could be as simple as incorporating the Google Maps API on your contacts page or as complex as developing an AJAX self-service configurator to help customers get the products that are best suited to them. There are so many useful technologies and services being developed – it seems rude not to extend them to your customers.

That's it. Of course this is not rocket science and is far from the cutting edge. But it's a start and, judging by some the conversations I had at the Inside the bubble event, right now that's what many in marketing seem to need.

Navigating Marketing 2.0 (part 3): open source

Today I'm going to look at open source. While open source is not strictly speaking core to Web 2.0, the thinking and philosophy behind it is. And, I believe, it is the open source way of working which will have more impact on the way clients and agencies work together in future than anything else.

Of course, open source for many of us in technology is synonymous with software and the high profile of Linux, OpenOffice et al. The open source ethos has also spawned the Creative Commons approach to licensing intellectual property and the release of the APIs that have been used to create so many mashed-up applications and services.

This is all very well for creating new applications but what has it really to do with marketing communications?

For me this is at the core of the difference between Marketing 1.0 and Marketing 2.0. We can characterise ‘old marcoms’ as essentially a one way, blunt, broadcast affair that distributes largely sanitised “over polished” communications.

These communications talk at people rather than with them. This is now out of step with the new reality of blogs, wikis, ad blockers, Sky+ etc. It is the kind of approach that audiences mentally tune out of as fast as the messages hit their retinas.

The creation of Marketing 1.0 communications is also increasingly out of step. The days of the client handing the problem to their agency who vanish into a closed room for a couple of weeks and the return with the answer that they then must sell to the client must be numbered (and are already vanishing in more enlightened agencies).

Essentially, the old way is closed source.

One way of constructing a route forward is to look at the model offered by open source (the bazaar model) and apply this to the agency/client relationship. The result is to change the way agencies work with clients.

This model has 6 core principles:

1: Users should be treated as co-developers

This means embracing journalists, customers, bloggers, analysts etc as co-developers of the messages and strategies we create. While traditional agencies have always used research to pre-test their ideas, by the time it gets to that stage, there is little chance to change course (except when the feedback is so bad that it's a rip and replace exercise). Co-development doesn't mean abdicating responsibility for the message to 6 customers behind one-way glass. It does mean that you get more informed, more insightful input as the project progresses. Input that offers a more rounded view of the market, the challenges and potential solutions.

2: Early releases

Marketing 1.0 emphasised that the final communication be totally finished, totally polished and then rolled out. In contrast open source-based Marketing 2.0 means that messages are not over-polished. We put ideas out there and work with our co-developers to evolve them. We encourage them to gain a life of their own, to keep pace with the market.

3: Frequent integration

Building on the idea of early releases, we need to constantly farm for new ideas and insights from other disciplines and industries and integrate them often. The project keeps moving forward. This is, of course, easier for integrated agencies as they have less of the silo-mentality that afflicts old-school single-discipline agencies.

4: Several versions

If Web 2.0 teaches us anything, it's that the media are fragmenting. For any message, there are a multitude of ways to connect with customers (even with ad-blockers, RSS and SKky+/Tivo etc). To succeed means ensuring you have a truly media-neutral idea driving the brand which can be re-configured in a wide variety of ways. It could also mean creating more stable (polished) campaigns for mass media and more 'buggy' (unpolished) campaigns for relational media (eg blogs) which can be further co-developed.

5: High modularisation

In a Marketing 2.0 world, every campaign is a holistic campaign. It's not enough to run an ad and think the job's done (actually, this has always been the case). Even on limited budgets, it's still vital to think through all the modules that are needed to make the campaign successful (again this is something that comes more naturally to integrated agencies). It means being able to create modular campaigns that allow for parallel development (possibly by multiple partners). And, of course, none of this must negatively impact upon available timescales.

6: Dynamic decision making

Speaking of deadlines, it is vital that clients and agencies have a way of making strategic decisions quickly and effectively within a changing environment. With the latest workflow systems and development wikis this is now easier than ever but on international assignments with layers of sign-off this still presents challenges for everyone involved.

The open source model presents a compelling blueprint for how Marketing 2.0 will develop.

Are we there yet? No. While today's integrated agencies are adopting some of these ideas, embedding them throughout both agencies and clients will take time and commitment. This will be less a case of if than when.