How about laughing at the absurdity of it all?

We can all probably laugh along with the above spot that introduces Best Buy’s Buy Back program. The insight behind the campaign is crystal clear: many consumers hesitate to invest in new technology because they’ve experienced the near-instant obsolescence of their past purchases (sound familiar, Apple users?). The spots have the luxury of generating a few laughts because the Buy Back program does the heavy lifting, addressing the core frustrations behind Future Fear; namely, the fact that hidden costs of never-ending upgrades and replacements, combined with the realities of the current financial climate, have forced consumers to think defensively. In a shopping environment that’s lost a lot of its joy and gratification, it’s wise for Best Buy to inject a bit of levity. Surely, their consumers are ready for a laugh.

Another campaign that shares the lighter side of long-term apprehension is Volkswagen’s new interactive site, True Life Costs. The landscape pictured to the right, encourages (UK) users to classify their various expenditures on leisure activities, food, family, and more. After you’ve done the work, the site tallies up your lifelong costs and creates a personalized chart that can be compared to the average consumer, or shared on Facebook for comparisons with your presumably un-average friends (tapping Driven by Data, of course). There’s plenty to rave about on the site: the 3-D navigation, the cutesy little community, and the way that Volkswagen turns one of the most boring topics imaginable (long-term household spending) into something fun and a bit whimsical. 

And, like the Best Buy effort, there’s a pretty blunt insight emanating from the campaign: when car shoppers are thinking about value, they should be considering long-term costs beyond the initial investment. In fact, the campaign probably hangs a bit too literally on this insight, as the message is driven home repeatedly in the voiceover. Perhaps they felt that the cuteness of the environment had done enough to establish the lighthearted tone, but it seems like including a bit of Best Buy’s winking subtlety would’ve been the final piece to complete this puzzle. (Well, that and using the UK equivalent of Mint to automatically import user’s spending habits in one step, but now we’re getting really picky.)

The point, once again, is that marketers need not fear these troubled times. Rather, there are a slew of opportunities for marketers to acknowledge their consumers’ concerns, work to relieve them, and then share a good laugh about the whole thing.

But, perhaps your first question isn’t how to respond; maybe you’re asking why you should bother responding in the first place. Marketers might be understandably skeptical about whether there’s anything that can be done after a customer has left a complaint in public. Rather than argue, we’ll let the folks at Dell defend this point (thanks to their presentation at SXSWi). The brand has addressed over 5,000 customer complaints on their Facebook page in the past year, using a dedicated Facebook customer service team (with ties to both Dell’s social media and PR teams) to offer organized, coordinated solutions to these complaints. It doesn’t always lead to bunny rabbits and cotton candy, but Dell’s managed these situations so well that 36% of the initial critics have actually returned to the Dell Facebook page to leave positive responses (and that doesn’t include the people who kept their satisfaction private). One audience member at the panel summed up these interactions nicely: instead of fearing negative comments, brands should view them as an opportunity to publicly demonstrate how well the company responds to adversity. Along those lines, it’s worth mentioning Taco Bell’s recent double-barreled response to questions about their taco meat. We commended their aggressiveness at the beginning of the campaign, but now that some time has passed, we can see that the strategy has paid off. Throughout their retort, the brand’s buzz, quality and propensity-to-recommend scores have all rebounded from the initial battering they took when the meat madness began.

We argued in our trends report that 2011 will be the year that brands and marketers get smarter about their participation in online conversations, learning when to respond, when to ignore, and when to fire back. This sentiment was regularly echoed in a session called “To Reply or Not to Reply?” at SXSW Interactive. For starters, a representative from CNN explained how the network decides whether to respond to the significant number of tweets, Facebook mentions, and other comments that the company receives across various social media channels. His answer was disarmingly simple: CNN only responds to questions that they know that they can answer, when they know they can be helpful, or when they know that they have additional information that is relevant to the discussion. When none of those conditions can be satisfied, they don’t respond. Sounds easy enough, right? But think about how much restraint that approach requires: ignoring visitors who are trying to provoke them with negative comments, ignoring questions that can’t be answered easily in the context of social media, and the like. Still, by being smarter about the conversations in which they do participate, CNN defines the appropriate parameters of these social conversations over time. In other words, participants learn what kind of conversations will elicit a response or interaction from CNN, which incentivizes users to shape their comments to these standards. Over time, the community reaches a more desirable level of conversation, and all without any heavy-handedness (and the inherent backlash) from the CNN moderators.

Part of getting smarter about the War on Whiners involves being proactive about defining the boundaries of appropriate conversations, including the what (clearly defining what content is appropriate), the where (funneling conversations to fewer, more manageable destinations), and the who (using services like Klout to determine the influence of each person). But, one thing that we haven’t addressed os the “when.” Another attendee in “Reply or Not” conversation suggested that more brands should consider posting “open hours” when they’ll be most active about responding to their customers. While this probably can’t replace the need for 24-hour complaint monitoring on Twitter or Facebook (where people expect instant results), it’s certainly an interesting strategy worth trying. If it works, this strategy may help concentrate complaints into a more manageable time frame, allowing brands to address similar complaints all at once, rather than repeatedly answering the same concerns around the clock.

Still, the reason that today’s War on Whiners isn’t your grandfather’s war is the consumer’s expectation of instant feedback. This expectation was a recurring concern among many marketers at SXSW, and with good reason. Delivering near-instant feedback requires that brands invest significant resources in social media monitoring and responding, while this speed also increases the potential for mistakes that could amplify an individual complaint into a PR nightmare. Fortunately, services are emerging to help marketers in this ever-quickening world. For marketers responding to customer service issues on Facebook, a writer from the Inside Facebook blog recommended integrating services like Parature, which lets users monitor Facebook conversations for customer service issues and respond to them directly. But, perhaps Parature’s most important feature was the ability for users to initiate a live chat with the customer within Facebook. You might be wondering what’s so appealing about a chat window (and waiting a minute or two between each response) when the world of Twitter has conditioned users to expect instantaneous responses, but the answer’s right there in the question. Customer service chats are desirable for brands precisely because of the expectation that there’ll be some lag between questions and answers, unlike tweets or, interestingly, speaking to a service rep on the phone. Chat gives the customer service rep additional time to seek answers, or manage multiple requests, while consumers still feel like they are getting immediate service. Everyone’s happy, and the whining’s taken a significant hit. For now.

Be sure to check back for Part 8 of our SXSWrapup!

• Our #1 hit of 2010 was our celebration of the innovative marketing efforts of… a car company? An American car company?? Yep, Ford has Facebook all figured out, especially with their live launch of their 2011 Explorer. No other marketer demonstrated such a nuanced approach to engaging with consumers via Facebook. It’s the perfect case study for seamlessly applying all the features that Facebook has to offer, and giving consumers what they actually want from a brand on social media. (It’s also one of the reasons we wholeheartedly agree with Ad Age naming Ford marketer of the year for 2010.)
• Part of the impetus for naming Cause with Effect as a 2011 trend came from watching the shifts in cause marketing over the course of 2010. Pepsi Refresh was clearly the game changer in this category, but we put Levi’s “Ready to Work” campaign under the microscope because it really drove home the depth-over-breadth approach that we expect to become a bigger focus in 2011. Likewise, one of the few bright spots that came out of the Haitian disaster was discovering that enormous sums of charitable money could be generated by aggregating millions of small (mobile) donations. If only this breast cancer awareness gag could have tapped that tactic!
• Anyone could’ve told you that food trucks are poised to upend the restaurant world in 2011, but readers were enthusiastic about our coverage of non-food applications for the food truck fad.
• It’s not everyday that our readers get jazzed about billboards, but these outdoor spectacles changed that perception pretty quickly. Likewise, we think this might be the only time a conversation about sustainable packaging has ever been so damn sexy.

Head this way for Part 2!

When we’ve talked about telling the “story” of your brand, we’ve often found that online video provides a compelling medium for doing so, even if the topic isn’t inherently sexy. Case in point: consider the juxtaposition of these two videos that view the world through the eyes of Google Street View and Facebook.

Both are extremely compelling (and really well-done), but seeing them side-by-side is shorthand for how each company is generally perceived. Google (shown above) brings the entire world’s information to your fingertips, allowing explorations that would be unfathomable only a few years ago.

Then again, the Google video doesn’t focus much on people. For that, you’ll have to turn to Facebook (shown below), as you follow the trajectory of one user’s life. No site captures the essence of modern relationships quite like Facebook, and as the video shows, that includes the best and worst parts of living in public. (And just like in real life, there are a few cuss words, so don’t watch the video if a couple of f-bombs will ruin your day.)

Enjoy these videos for what they are, but when you’re done, ask yourself: if your brand’s worldview was portrayed in a video, what would it look like? Are you happy with the result?

[Update: Well, the original video got pulled because of a copyright violation for using the song "Paint it Black," so we'll have to use this music-less version instead. Kinda loses some of the impact, but you could always just sync up the song yourself, right?]

[Update #2: Since the Stones' label so rudely ruined the Facebook video above, we felt we owed you another piece of good content. Thanks to Jaclyn Gordyan, we've got a behind-the-curtain peek at the Google Street View video from the top of this post. Enjoy!]

We’re a bit under-the-gun today (as always, that means we’ve got some good stuff comin’), so we’ll keep today’s post short and sweet.

Actually, there’s nothing sweet about the video above – in fact, it’s clearly the product of a particularly bitter summer. For those who aren’t aware, it’s been a slightly tumultuous summer for LeBron James. Nike – never one to shy away from controversy – acknowledges as much in this new ad, debuting the night before the NBA season kicks off. While it demonstrates a number of things quite well, we’ll focus on its role in the Reputation Economy. After all, James’ reputation took an extraordinary hit over the past few months, unraveling seven years’ worth of coordinated branding on his part. This bold video questions both James’ actions and the public’s response, and defiantly asserts James’ independence as the season begins. When every other brand out there is backpedaling at the first signs of controversy (ahem), it’s interesting to see the polar opposite approach. Think it’ll work?

Gap just broke out a new logo. But rather than refreshing the brand to connect with a new generation of consumers, Gap managed to send the world of art directors into a tizzy. Many of these critics have aired their grievances in a refreshingly productive manner; a redesign contest at ISO50 already has about 200 entries. By now, the hubbub has caught the attention of Gap executives, who are now promising to crowd-source their way out of this debacle.

Ah, tapping the power of consumer-controlled conversations to appease a passionate micro community of designers. It’s trend-a-licious, isn’t it? (A handful of Pepsi and Tropicana execs are solemnly nodding in the distance.) Of course, this approach has its critics, too. An open call for logo designs could also be interpreted as the spec work problem gone awry (i.e. declining quality + no one paying designers = everyone loses). Is there a middle ground that will make everyone happy?

Possibly. And it’s full of potassium.

A recent campaign from Chiquita provides a thought-provoking possibility for this predicament. Visitors to eatachiquita.com get the chance to design their own labels, combining a couple hundred elements into essentially endless possibilities. (Over 25,000 possibilities have been designed so far.) The top-rated stickers will be featured on bananas starting in November, but any design you create can be printed on a variety of shirts and other swag thanks to a partnership with Zazzle.

There are quite a few moving parts to this campaign, so let’s focus on the pieces that most relevant to the situation currently facing the Gap. (Otherwise, we would rave about the brilliance of that Zazzle piece.) Both brands faced the basic question about whether to mess with logos that have been iconic mainstays in the advertising world. But while the Gap (and Pepsi, for that matter) went ahead and thrust their new design on an unsuspecting public, Chiquita hasn’t committed one way or the other. Their strategy seems to be: have some fun, play with the logo, and let’s see where this goes. Maybe they’ll need a redesign, maybe they won’t. Maybe a new logo will come out of this experiment, maybe it won’t. Actually, it probably won’t. But, if and when it’s time for a logo redesign, the brand will have one hell of a focus group to draw from, having many thousands of consumers telling them exactly what they’d put on a banana.

In addition, letting aspiring designers choose from a curated set of elements saves the brand from the darker side of consumer-controlled conversations – you know, the part where your brand’s critics mercilessly tear you apart via your open-ended campaign. Unless someone manages to compose a scathing rant out of cartoon noses, Chiquita should make it through this unharmed (and even then, you’d have to admire the effort).

But, perhaps most importantly, there’s now a sense of discovery when it comes to something as banal as bananas. That little sticker isn’t a whole lot of real estate to begin with, but it’s now become something for shoppers to stop and seek out. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about when we aim to break through the autopilot of the normal grocery experience. You know where we’re headed with this, right? Yep, it’s a manifestation of yet another of our 10 trends for 2010 – delighting consumers with hidden surprises. Anytime you can deliver unexpected moments of joy via a friggin’ banana, you know you’ve broken through the clutter.

(For more background on how the Chiquita campaign came about, check out this interview.)

The latter is part of Levi’s “Ready to Work” campaign, which bluntly addresses the current struggles of the American worker. Not exactly a small problem with an easy solution, right? As a whole, the issue is overwhelming; even a significant contribution would likely have little effect on the problem at large. Instead, Levi’s focused on making legitimate, comprehensive improvements to a single community. Following the logic of Hometown Heroism, Levi’s forges an undeniable connection to the residents of Braddock, distinguishing the brand as one that’s willing to act rather than just talk. By building community centers, urban farms, and libraries, the campaign is making tangible, long-term improvements to the region.

Of course, calling attention to a brand’s charitable efforts always runs the risk of making the CSR campaign seem inauthentic. But, “Ready to Work” doesn’t feel that way; even the comments on the Youtube videos are uncharacteristically supportive. Why is this campaign connecting with consumers without coming off as a cheap stunt? We think there are a few explanations.

For one, the campaign is daringly innovative. How many brands would have the courage to take on the daunting task of reviving a depleted community? As articulated in a post from Ed Cotton, this campaign communicates a good foundational idea in an interesting, compelling manner. By collaborating with IFC and the Sundance Channel to document the in a video series, Levi’s ends up telling the story of grassroots community revitalization instead of running around yelling “Hey, look at what a nice company we are! No really, look!”

Moreover, consumers want brands to be more socially responsible, and seem to be more comfortable with marketers publicizing these campaigns as long as the efforts themselves are authentic. Even the most cynical critic has to acknowledge that Levi’s efforts are making a legitimate, measurable difference in Braddock, so publicizing these contributions is accepted (if not encouraged). The central idea of the campaign is more than a hollow marketing ploy; it is coming to life for real people.

And, these real results bring us back to the idea of “small” cause marketing. In our opinion, the third factor that explains the embrace of this campaign is the motivational power of getting something done. As we stated above, reviving post-industrial communities is a gargantuan task, but bringing just one to life is a feasible possibility, as demonstrated by this campaign. Levi’s is forging a blueprint for how this process could work, but also showing that these efforts do work, and are thus worth pursuing in the first place. And that’s why people who have no connection to Braddock specifically can relate to this campaign at large. It’s an example of a brand delivering on a series of small promises, and achieving big results in the process.

Well, almost on cue, Pepsi took a giant step towards redemption. Under the umbrella of their Refresh project, Pepsi earmarked $1.3 million to specifically address the Gulf recovery project, and are currently considering over 250 ideas. This approach is pitch perfect, with the smart folks at PSFK summing it up best:

“Pepsi’s approach feels honest and sincere – it doesn’t try to hype Pepsi’s role in the cleanup, but rather empowers consumers to play that role – the brand simply pledges financial backing to execute the best ideas. Additionally, it’s not overly sentimental (no images of dead birds, or burning turtles) – just an actionable, empowered attitude to help fix a problem.”

That’s exactly right, and brands looking to score an authentic CSR victory should take note. But, in the context of our earlier discussion about the Reputation Economy, there’s another lesson worth noting. We mentioned that reputation is now a long-term process that requires continuous attention, and if done properly, will resonate with consumers on a deep emotional level (even in spite of an occasional misstep). Sure, the Pepsi nutritional blog was a dumb move, but rather than fighting the blog’s critics, Pepsi acknowledged their mistake, took down the ill-advised project, and doubled-down on a cause program that will make a legitimate, impactful difference in the lives of an entire region’s population. Put another way, the way they undid their bad was to do even more good. And that, folks, is why it’s called the Reputation Economy. Your brand is the sum of a mental calculation, a tradeoff between the trust you’ve inspired in your consumers (both directly and indirectly) and the impacts you’re making on the world. Authentic, effective good deeds will go a long way towards tipping the scales in your favor.

Pepsi undoubtedly spent a lot of time considering this tradeoff before delving into their CSR campaign, but one thing they probably didn’t anticipate was that the perception of the Refresh campaign would be shaped by the company’s tangential actions elsewhere. Like, for instance, a Pepsi-sponsored nutrition blog with some questionable assertions.

Welcome to the Reputation Economy, where instantly-accessible information makes it infinitely easier for consumers to connect the dots between a brand’s disparate actions. While a massive company like Pepsi probably isn’t making any connection between the Refresh project the nutrition blog, the consumer experiences these efforts as a composite branded experience, and makes their judgments accordingly.

And Pepsi’s not alone. A recent article from Forbes touted a list of the most imaginative CSR campaigns, but many of brands lauded within have encountered some backlash for their own tangentially-related missteps. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is one of the most heralded CSR campaigns in recent memory, except by the critics who noted that Dove’s sister company Axe was doing just as much to undermine women’s self-images. Even the comment section on the Forbes article displays these sentiments, such as one poster who questioned how Levi’s could justify a campaign focused on the struggling American worker while producing their jeans in overseas factories.

So, is the lesson here that CSR campaigns aren’t worth the trouble? We wouldn’t go that far. The “economy” in Reputation Economy isn’t just jargon; rather, it signals that brand-building via CSR is a long-term process that requires continuous attention, and is bound to have its ups and downs. Still we believe that there’s a worthwhile long-term payoff. If Pepsi, Dove, Levi’s, and other brands stick to their guns, they have the opportunity to connect with consumers on a deeply resonant emotional level that goes far beyond the utility of their products. If done properly, these gaffes will ultimately be considered missteps, rather than fundamental flaws that derail their CSR efforts. Still, any company that chooses to invest in CSR campaigns must consider this high-risk/high-reward tradeoff, and be extra careful in ensuring that their company’s broader actions do not contradict or undermine their more noble efforts.

We weren’t being literal about the whole “pie” thing. Perhaps we should have been.

Domino’s is consciously bringing their pizza pies down-to-earth as part of their controversial efforts to combat the chain’s negative perceptions (which taps the Reputation Economy trend as much as D-t-E-ism). Taking a page from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, Domino’s will only be using real pizzas (made by Domino’s employees) in future advertisements. Well, if that’s the case, why spend the money on a professional photographer? After all, there are plenty of real pizzas already sitting on consumers’ tables (although, considering the target audience, we should probably say “laps”). That explains their new “Show Us Your Pizza” campaign, in which they will feature photos of Domino’s pizzas submitted by their consumers.

We’ve got to hand it to Domino’s. This entire effort (starting with the Pizza Turnaround) has been a risky proposition from the start: acknowledging their product’s inferiority, making their transformation transparent, welcoming consumers’ feedback, and now, peeling back the glitz and glamor that’s prevalent through out the food industry. It will be interesting to see if this succeeds in the long run, and whether their product can live up to the promises of this campaign. But for now, you have to admit that Domino’s is clearly differentiating themselves from their pizza peers.