Selling tales

Until fairly recently, I used to think I worked in advertising. Well, recruitment advertising, but more or less the same thing, like cod roe is to caviare  It was fairly straightforward: you created a proposition based upon something that made your client's product (or, in my case, job) sound better than the competition and then told people about it. And it seems it's the telling that is now the thing, possibly at the expense of the product itself. Because we are no longer in the advertising business. These days we are story-tellers.

This trend really struck me during a recent trip to the cinema; in the advertising break preceding the film I noticed that, although the ads were produced entirely independently of each other, without exception they had this technique in common. In fact, when viewed sequentially, it gave the ad break a greater narrative coherence than the film I had actually paid to see. Not one of the products would deign to tell me why I should part with my hard-earned for it. They were softening me up with a sappy tale, so I'd befriend them on Facebook, or tweet my followers how moved I was by their heart-warming narrative. And I forgot them instantly.

But there's no shortage of ad campaigns to illustrate this trend. Here's a particularly fatuous example by Nurofen, a generic drug to cure a hangover. Unless you work in advertising:

If you go to the Facebook page, you could view stories about people who "have lives bigger than pain".



These people are just too damn sexy to let something like pain get in their way. They are too busy being dynamic and inspirational to have a headache. They don't just laugh in the face of pain, they chase it down in their helicopters and run it over with their motorbikes. For them, Nurofen is not a confined to the medicine cabinet, it is a part of them. It makes them the successful overachieving human beings they are. If your own life doesn't live up to this, maybe it's time you took more drugs.

This campaign was lauded in the marketing press for positioning Nurofen as a "lifestyle brand", putting “emotional resonance” alongside what it says is “established functional brilliance”. And it can be argued this is no different from the old advertising adage of "dramatising the benefit" of your product. That's benefit, singular - if you'll allow me a diversion into Advertising 101 for a moment, there may be many things about your product that you think are marvellous, but you need to find the single strongest point of difference and amplify it. This "Unique Selling Point/Proposition" is usually simple and short, containing a single idea ('soft, strong and very, very long'; 'No ordinary battery looks like or lasts like it'; 'a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat'), in order to be memorable. If you pack too much into a Proposition, you can't remember it easily. It takes a surprising amount of work and creativity to strip something down to this level of simplicity but, like a revealed truth, when you get it right, it has a power and resonance that can transform an entire business's commercial performance.

But where once we had a line on a poster or 30 seconds in the middle of "Catchphrase", we now have YouTube channels, twitter, FourSquare and Instagram. We can make 6-second Vines of how our lives are bigger than pain and send them to Nurofen for the chance to win a life. We can make friends with a paracetamol on Facebook and share pictures of our children. And for me, here's where the difference lies between real advertising and what Nurofen is doing. The creative articulation of your proposition is a distillation. You take lots of boring information, snapshots, opinions, market data, customer views and try reduce them to the best way to express your product's strongest point. Like an atom, you try to pack as much meaning and insight into as small a space as possible to create a building block for your campaign. Here Nurofen have taken their proposition - For Lives Bigger Than Pain - and have done the opposite. They have unpacked it, split the atom and blown wide a mess of "content" to share among their audience, all with lives bigger than pain, apparently. And like an atom, they have discovered at its core, it is almost entirely empty space.

For Lives Bigger Than Pain is almost entirely meaningless. If your life isn't "bigger than pain", you're going to need something a damn sight more powerful than Nurofen to get you through the day. Whereas you might have gotten away with a vacuous strapline in the days of Old Media, in today's media landscape, you're going to get found out. Because no matter how weak your story, a campaign now demands you tell it repeatedly across every media channel in Christendom.

Nurofen are not the only ones. Vanish detergent's TV spots promote its Facebook-based "Tip Exchange", where apparently otherwise sensible people befriend each other over a shared love of stain removal. Tips that seem to begin and end with "use Vanish detergent". Ambrosia custard is now re-telling us our social histories through puddings (though given their product tastes of reconstituted bee shit, maybe this is a good tactic). Even dear old Andrex has moved on from puppy-based euphemisms for softness to asking people to tell them how they wipe their arses (I wish I were joking - here). All ideas born of a rush to create an idea on the thinnest of premises with one eye on how many Likes they can get on Facebook without thinking if this is giving people a reason to buy the product.

Campaign propositions are being stretched and tested by the rise of social media and turned into become something more sophisticated. Or at least more complicated. All of which makes me hopeful for the future quality of advertising. Because now it's not enough to tell people why your product is good. You have to tell them a story. But the most important point to remember is that a good story comes from a good idea. And the scope for sharing ideas in an interconnected world will quickly show up the limitations of bad ones.

Taking the Mickey

"Hello, my name is Victoria. How can I sprinkle some Disney magic on your day?"

I'm not sure if this is a question one adult should ask of another as part of a serious business transaction, but it was one that was addressed to me today. To which I replied "you could start by saying things that are less likely to make me throw up".

Of course I didn't. I'm English, so I said "Um, hello, yes, well."

What had brought me to this unexpected gambit was the need for information. A few days ago I spent an evening researching the options for a short trip to Disneyland Paris on their surprisingly poor website, which is all about pushing unnecessary rich branded content at the expense of cramped text and slow-loading information. Having near worn-out the F5 key through repeated page-loading, thanks to their over-use of Flash, I had eventually found the information I needed, except one important detail: could I park my car at the hotel for free or would it cost extra? It was not mentioned as part of the standard benefits, and Valet parking was mentioned only at the most expensive hotels. What about the plebs looking to drive and stay at the middle-of-the-range places?

The "Search" function on the site could tell you the daily parking rates inside the park itself. After that, the word "parking" becomes assumed to be a long-tail search variant on "park", and there are lots of Disney words about the Parks at Disneyland Paris on their website.

But there was also an FAQ section that either offered answers to the sort of questions no-one would actually ask, or were patsies to sell you, once again, the magical details about the magical park features. For example: "What is a resort?" or "Are there any special offers?" Not "will you bastards sting me for more money if I bring my car?"

In the absence of an email option (!), I was forced to use the phone, carefully navigating the menus until I reached "For any other questions about your Disneyland Paris holiday, press 3". I pressed in triumph, only to hear a recorded message asking me rhetorically whether I knew that "ALL the answers to your questions about a holiday can be found on our website". At that point, I was cheerily cut-off. I tried again, just to be sure I hadn't accidentally terminated the call myself. No, it was definitely Disney who didn't want to talk. The customer is clearly only right at Disney as long as they ask the sort of questions it wants to answer.

To get the answer to my question, I had to break the system: pretend to make a booking and then, when put through to the lovely Victoria, ask my question. At first I was annoyed by the arrogance of Disney, simply denying there would be a question they had not already answered. It's certainly a patronising, not to say insulting, approach to customer service to take a "mummy knows best" approach, and ignore the crying in the nursery.

But it reflects a paradox at the heart of Disney's customer service. As they so proudly admit "At Disneyland, kids rule". The Kids Are King, but the parents must pay their taxes. And to deliver a child's paradise, you must start by infantilising the parents. We will take away all your need to think, plan or rationalise, we will swamp you with convenience to give you the full transplanted American experience: a holiday of customer service. No faced left unsmiled, no arse left unwiped. And in return we'll make it as difficult as we can to do anything other than pay us all your money to do everything for you: hotel, travel, tickets, meals, entertainment. The promise of Disney's service is not built around the customer's desires, but the illusion of choice between a small number of bolted-together packages. Because the point of a conjurer's act is to enjoy the magic not to ask how the trick is done, in case you spoil it for the children.

Choosing not to choose

My experience of upgrading my mobile phone recently made me think about the nature of choice, and why our desire to choose is sometimes selective. Does the giddying range of channels, through which we can access an ever-growing list of things we never even knew we wanted, help us to be better informed and make better purchasing decisions? Or does it, in fact, encourage us to retreat into entrenched positions, defeated into default choices through the entropy of uberinformation?

I wanted to switch to an Android system phone, away from my much-despised iPhone mk I, and had decided was going to upgrade to the new Samsung Galaxy S3. Although not particularly in love with my present provider, Orange, they had a competitive offer for the phone, and the path of least resistance to attain my object was reason enough to stay with them. But I was shocked out of this acquiescence through the sheer unwillingness of Orange to help me easily get what I wanted. Pressures of work meant I could only upgrade my phone at the weekend, and although the phone was out of stock, I was prepared to wait a week, since they had a delivery due in the coming days. However, the Orange store would not hold one back for me, even if I committed to a new contract in advance. Orange insisted I do the paperwork, then leave the store with the phone. This meant taking my chances they wouldn't sell out between the new shipment arriving and the following weekend - or, indeed, any number of subsequent weekends. Quite a risk for a new, in-demand phone.

So I switched provider that day. Eight years of continuous patronage disappeared, as I picked a new provider who could get me what I wanted. Looking back, I realise it wasn't an impulsive decision, but something I had unconsciously wanted to do; the number of times I actually make contact with a service provider like a mobile phone company is very few, so they need to make those count. The exasperating experience in the store that day reminded me the previous occasion Orange contacted me directly - via text to tell me last January they were increasing their prices. No apologies, no "we value your custom", just a matter-of-fact 160-character SMS. In an era when it's almost easier to change phone company than to change your pants, it seemed Orange were determined to give me reasons to go commando.

Although poor customer service had goaded me into choosing something better, I could make that decision with reasonable confidence, as there was very little difference in my mind between major mobile phone companies. Coverage is no longer to point-of-difference it once was, so it just comes down to the tariff and, more importantly, the phone itself. Committing to a new phone is actually the biggest part of a new mobile contract, since it's the large carrot they dangle to get the next two years of your life.

For those unfamiliar with the workings of Steve Jobs's creation, the iPhone is a closed system. It offers stylish and elegant ways to perform most functions you could ask of a portable computer on Steve's terms: Apple approved and controlled programmes all the way, subject to the whims and hissy fits of Jobs's own obsessions. There are no crossovers, mashups or collaborations, no breaking new ground through open-source, collective ideas-generation. Apple is the anti-Internet, an overbearing parent. And the worst manifestation of this is the Apple default media interface: iTunes, an idea so bad I still can't believe people put up with it.

That they do reveals a paradox at the heart of the choice. The hefty smartphone contract you are forced to take with a mobile company, in order for them to recoup the handset costs, means people will be cautious in their choices, afraid of being stuck with a lemon for two years. The explosion in the range of things you can do with your phone these days - and our increased expectations of them - have, on the one hand opened up many more choices in the way we shop, discover, interact, create and keep in touch. Yet at the same time, they increase the risk associated with making the wrong choice. Technology has, in many ways, set us free, and yet that freedom has created its own dependency that limits choice. We don't need to know which way is north because we have portable GPS devices. We don't need to write letters any more because we can keep in touch in realtime. This stuff is now too important to be left to chance, or the risk of discovering a new way doing things. Better the devil you know, even if it doesn't let you choose your own ringtone.

Orange set up their upgrade system for their own administrative convenience, forgetting about the convenience of the customer. My reaction was a natural one in a market that offers a competitive choice. Apple offers a different type of inconvenience for its own reasons of control rather than the benefit of the customer, and yet people seem happy to give up this choice for the benign dictatorship of the iPhone product. After the death of the Wizard of Odd himself last October, tech speculators have been waiting for Apple to stumble without Jobs's guiding hand. They look for signs of a lack of innovation, staleness as indicators of decline. I hope that any such slip, when it comes, will be a sign of people realising they do have a choice.

All the fun of the Workfare

Last week I referred to David Jones's book "Who cares wins", where he describes how social media is forcing leading brands to behave ethically, or expect to be taken to task for their actions in ways that would have been unimaginable just 5 years ago. He refers to the present business climate as the Age of Damage for this reason, and this week we saw an example of how it can impact even the surest social media operators. Having heaped praise onto @UKTesco for their deft use of Twitter to engage with customers last week, I spent this week pouring scorn upon a somewhat shabbier aspect of their employment practices: the ironically named Workfare.

On Thursday, twitter was alive with the news that Tesco was using the unemployed to stack its shelves, which would ordinarily be A Good Thing. The difference here was it was advertising jobs for no actual pay; the unemployed were expected to do the job for the same government benefits as they'd receive for looking for a real job, or, for that matter, sitting on a sofa. What Tesco characterised as "offering work experience", others saw as "offering no money for normally paid work". This was rather reinforced by news that those refusing to take the Tesco non-shilling would lose those very benefits Tesco was substituting for wages. It doesn't take a Shakespearean imagination to see this scheme as something approaching indentured servitude, to use an anachronistic euphemism. Or #TescoSlaveShame as the rather more pithy twitter hashtag would have it.

After spending the day trending on twitter, things skidded into a full-blown car-crash, as Friday's Daily Mail published the full story. Not normally known to be sympathetic to the needs of benefits claimants, even Paul Dacre's myopic scribes could see there might be something awry with the fairness of the scheme. Tesco's response seemed curiously slow-witted, as though it couldn't see the damage being done to its reputation: by the afternoon, its twitter stream was on lockdown, with the only response to the thousands of tweets and retweets being a single 140-character reply.

Tesco seemed paralysed between choices, like Buridan's donkey, busily deciding to do nothing: it neither defended its actions with particular skill nor took decisive action to reassess its participation in the Workfare scheme. The rather mealy-mouthed rebuttal was that the scheme came with a guaranteed interview at the end (whose date was unspecified) for all participants, blaming "an IT error" for it appearing in Job Centres as a real job. To those who questioned why a company with annual profits of £3.8bn would need to use unpaid labour, it offered the pledge it was trying to persuade the government to remove the threat of benefits withdrawal to those who didn't want to take part.

The episode had all the hallmarks of an Age of Damage fail: a badly thought through scheme, poorly understood internally and a corporate communications team paralysed from taking decisive action. It also shows a failure of leadership by senior management at Tesco, a failure by anyone to take charge of a worsening situation and to tackle genuine customer concerns head on. When it entered Workfare, Tesco was probably already planning the PR triumph it could claim from helping the unemployed - and in some cases those written off as unemployable - into full time work. By failing to understand the implications of the scheme - in particular, the forced participation under threat of benefit loss - Tesco's social antennae were uncharacteristically out of tune with how this would play with its customers.

With a few tweaks this could have been something of a PR win for Tesco. For some long-term unemployed people, the opportunity to get some work experience with a major employer, even just for expenses, might be attractive - to help build up some self-confidence, give them something to put on a CV, or just put them in contention when a paid position came up. Tesco could have offered to pay the difference between Job Seekers Allowance and the wage for the job, making everyone quids in. Or they could have done what Sainsbury's did: took a long hard look at the scheme and decided it would be better if they withdrew.

Tesco had better be sure that it's worth the candle for them, with the like of boycottworkfare.org on their case, using social media like twitter and Facebook to beat them daily until they do something decisive. Not to mention customers like me who might now have, in the back of their mind, the nagging feeling that the person helping me with my shopping is a modern slave. That sort of thing can do terrible damage to a brand, in a competitive market like food retail.

A tale of two twitters

Recently I've been enjoying social media conversations with two companies who, between them, probably take more of my post-tax income than any other. Although both have (so far) had similar outcomes, some important differences between the two businesses, highlighted through this social media engagement, illustrate some of the perils of dealing with customers in an era of greater transparency.

In his book Who cares wins, Havas CEO David Jones calls the current business climate the Age of Damage - and he's not talking about the post-crash performance of western economies. Rather damage, in this case, refers to the revolution social media has wrought and the pitfalls it presents to businesses in trying to manage interaction with their customers. Citing some familiar examples, such as BP, he outlines the enormous difficulty businesses have today containing risks to their corporate reputation. No longer is it possible to cover up or ignore questions over your commercial, financial or ethical probity when Twitter can transmit stories of wrongdoing around the world in a flash. Rather than worry about their reputations, businesses are better off trying to fix the problem.

Returning to my more humble social media interaction, I recently noticed in Tesco they were using QR codes in a store with no 3G signal, an obvious #fail. So I tweeted this observation to my followers, (but not to Tesco), yet within 10 minutes received the following reply:



Nice tone, non-defensive and a helpful solution offered - free wifi! This encouraged me a week later to tweet them back when I was unable to find any blonde hair dyes (shopping for a friend, you understand!) in the same store:

Again a reply that was quick, self-deprecating and attempted to be helpful in a situation when there was nothing much it can do. I get the sense I am being listened to, no matter how trivial or whiny I am.

Contrast this with Greater Anglia, the train company that took over my local train line from National Express East Anglia, and who now runs the commuter train service I must endure every day. There was much trumpeting on the local news of the turning of this new leaf in train services, with big emphasis on the increased staffing levels from their PR team. Now, if you ask fellow commuters what they want from this new train service, it's two things: trains that don't break down and signals that don't fail. Between them, these are the two biggest causes of delays outside the uncontrollable elements such as bridge strikes, suicides, overhead cable damage or trackside fires. More staff sounds a great idea, but in practice all that means is more people to announce delays and apologise for any inconvenience caused. Better information is perceived to be better customer serivce, when the best service is not breaking down in the first place. And I tweeted as much to @GreaterAnglia, who replied:

A complete failure to understand my point, or tackle head-on the real issue behind the question. And therein lies the difference. Tesco can engage me with social media, because it has the ability to tackle my comparatively simple needs, and stakes its reputation on the delivery of great customer service. By contrast, Greater Anglia must constantly firefight against the daily frustrations of its customers because it is fundamentally unable to give them what they want, so must, instead, mitigate it through improved information provision. Their twitter feed was a part of that - and it must be said a very useful and diligent attempt, for the most part, to keep passengers up to date with delays and cancellations. When taken as a whole, however, the @GreaterAnglia twitter stream reads as a littany of failure.

After my exchange of views, I was followed on twitter by @SnailRail who has developed a website that, for a small charge, will automate train delay compensation claims by commuters who use the Greater Anglia service. A neat business that feeds off the failure of the hidebound Greater Anglia, using social media to drive its business, and the inability of the train operator to respond to its customers' needs. In the Age of Damage, it's all about control.