WTF is a Voiceologist?

An expression my father would never use. Yet he too is a Voiceologist.

The online dictionary states the following: Voice (n) Definition: expression, language, opinion

-ologist or -ology; “one who knows (whatever the preceding element refers to)

I remember as a teenager I had an unsurpassed passion and drive to work in radio as jock like my father & grandfather before me but there was small stumbling block – I was hindered by a slight stutter. It wasn’t a really bad stutter, just a lack of confidence in certain circumstances. I’d get caught on certain letters words starting with the letter S, C & D.

I remember lining up at the tuck shop at school with my list of lunch items clearly rehearsed in my mind. The tuck shop would be a crowded affair with a bunch of eager hungry mouths keen to get the best of the pies and sticky buns. I’d get to the front of the queue and yeah you guessed it, “C-C-C-C-Could I have a meat pie & a D-D_D-D-Donut please?” Shit that tough at that age. Everybody was sniggering & laughing. I much preferred to take a packed lunch after that – much less embarrassing. A stutter would have been great if you wanted a career as a stand-up comedian, not so great if you want to speak proper like on the radio! So off I went to my local speech teacher sort it out.

For a number of years I toddled off after school for my 45min group lesson. Our teacher was this very la-di-da woman who seemed to be on another planet. She spoke oh so well dar-ling! How are you to-day? Who the hell spoke like that in the real world? I’m sure we drove her nuts. I remember we had this text book called ‘Rhymes with Reasons’. At the start of the term we had to record our voice reading these strange rhymes and then through the rest of term – practice but over-emphasising them.

To this day I remember the rhyme for the sound ‘ah’: Father’s Car is a Jaguar and he drive rather fast, Arthurs cart is far less smart & can’t go half as far. I would rather drive in my father’s fast cart than Arthur’s cart. As a teenager I thought – what a load of crap! But it worked didn’t it. That old bird of a teacher was right. How now dar-ling!

Throughout my working life I’ve loved playing with words. Lolling them around in my mouth and having fun with them. I’ll correct people on pronunciation and go mad at the new television presenters who persist with annunciating their pro-nouns.Those speech lessons put me in good position to pursue my associated careers so it just makes sense that my side-business is about voice & speech. I hope that I can have some influence over a young & aspiring media professional or actor.

This is what a retailer thinks is experiential! Only in the UK!

It belies belief really that a global retailing giant like IKEA can go to market and call this an experiential campaign!

 They might have the environment right (malls, transit et al) but their primary objective is to distribute 2010 product catalogues to punters wearing those snazzy TV backpacks. These are very cool tool to communicate to consumers but I wonder their effectiveness in transit locations where consumers are on the move & have very little dwell time. From what I can see, their display is bland and hardly sensory – just a few boxes to demonstrate the choice of products available.

This campaign is called a promotion or flyer/catalogue promotion. Not experiential marketing.

I love buying at IKEA. They’re super innovative when it comes to a model of retailing but someone in their agency should sit down & explain what an experiential marketing campaign is. I’ll leave you with the final judgement. As my earlier post suggests, it seems there are considerable opportunities in retail for experiential marketers.

What do you think?

http://bit.ly/2Fo1fQ

Face-to-Face Engagement

My Key 3 Steps

To me, face-to-face engagement is the last line in any retail, sales or promotional activity. It involves people; people selling, promoting or just building awareness. Your customers’ perception of your brand can be wrapped up in how well the face-to-face engagement people in your business represent you & your brand.

My focus has always been on the last three steps in any promotional or sales activity – the experience, the offer and the people engagement. There’s a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the business, marketing, advertising & design world to get you to these last few steps but for me, my expertise lies in my key 3 steps.

What concerns me is how little thought goes into selecting people to engaging customers. This post is about good people engagement V’s the bad.

Leading the Charge

My experience comes from dealing with promotional staff & their promoting or selling of big brands. Since 1998 I’ve assisted & run four staffing agencies based in Sydney but offering staff & services throughout Australia. With promotional staffing agencies, you’re often briefed or approached near the end of the program set up thus the ‘meat’ of the campaign is already well on the way to completion. Your strategy is planned, your creative is designed, your production elements & suppliers booked plus supporting media confirmed. So as a staffing agency we don’t need to concern ourselves with the back end of a campaign – just delivering an on-brief brand ambassador to the client.

I’ve provided staff for brands like Coca-Cola, 3 Mobile, Cadbury, Schweppes, Nestle, Hasbro, Yellow Pages, Sony, Kraft, McDonalds, Sony Ericsson, Diageo and Suncorp/GIO. In the agencies I worked in, we delivered for our clients staff ranging from promotional models, sales staff, sampling people, runners, bump in/out teams, couriers, stage managers, presenters, dieticians, MC’s, actors, entertainers and the run-of-the-mill brand ambassadors.

Further to that I’ve been a commercial radio presenter, a stage MC and a TV presenter and believe you me; when the back-end is not planned properly – you’re the one who looks like a dickhead when you front the audience and something goes wrong!

So if you’re reading this post & you’re not a from the marketing or advertising industry but a small to medium business, a retailer or someone who sells to customers in a face-to-face environment then you can still get value as the rules are the same in any game.

Recent Engagement

In my last full time role at the ad shop George Patterson Y&R, we rolled out a financial planning stand at a local investment expo for our client Suncorp as they were a major sponsor. Considerable work went into, as you’d expect, the design of the stand, the experience, the branding, the offer as well as the media supporting the activation; digital, press and radio. The objectives were to drive consumers to a competition entry where they got a free financial presentation along with the chance to win a holiday at Hamilton Island. All good so far!

There were three brand ambassadors to engage punters, keep the stand stocked, powered & tidy, report on numbers, sales, entries etc plus direct customers around the stand to our massage chairs, hand out water, apples etc. These staff couldn’t by law mention anything about financial planning as they were not qualified which was, again fine. They were working off a no advice model. The investment expo went for three days & the client chose to use two sets of three different financial planners each day. They didn’t make themselves available for a pre-expo training or guidelines. I don’t think they read the manual either. I don’t my client would mind this being mentioned as it was one of her key learning’s about the campaign.

The financial planners were very good at one-on-one financial planning but not very good at engagement of people at expos who were there for that very purpose. They drank coffee at the stand, read the newspaper, chatted, disappeared in a group and one or two of these actually engaged the expo visitors. As a result, 80% of the leads generated from the three days came from the brand ambassadors. A mammoth effort given that was not their primary objective.

See the final video of the stand expo at: http://bit.ly/3BvqPX

Good Engagement

You often don’t hear about it; great service, good engagement. You just walk away from the person having got what you paid for or having had a great chat with a nice person. It’s so easy to do. The foundations for good engagement are good manners. Smile, be empathetic, be happy in yourself (or at least smile through the pain), throw the customer a compliment, don’t judge & assesses, ask open ended questions, satisfy their needs & leave them feeling complete. Whammo. Is it much to ask?

Bad Engagement

We’ve all seen it. At a coffee shop, restaurant, in retail, in shopping malls, at events & expos and even at fully-funded client brand experiences. Put a chair there and they’ll sit down & watch the people walking by all the while judging & assessing that they’re not a customer that will want to buy from them. What really gets up my nose is at expos when a client is playing top dollar to be there, have created an amazing stand for 250k and they send their salespeople to man the stand on their weekend off. They would really rather be somewhere else & it shows.

It’s no wonder many customers don’t come back to exhibit at expos & events because they didn’t meet their sales targets. Sure there are other contributing factors as to their future withdrawal but the bottom line speaks volume on many occasions.

Who needs a refresher?

As a result, I’m in the process of developing a series of face-to-face engagement seminars & workshops for these very people. It’s not rocket surgery but would-be engagement people for expos, promotions, events, sampling programs, retail and shopping centre activity will get the basics in a four-hour, fun-filled session . Stay tuned.

Love to hear your thoughts on good engagement vs. bad engagement? Can you tell me some good engagement stories? (We always remember the bad ones). What did they do that stood out?

Brand Experience for Small to Medium Business

The early days

There’s nothing more exciting than creating brand theatre for consumers; brand theatre that produces results for clients using a big creative idea that captures consumer imagination & they participate.

In the last 11 years I’ve been happily associated with building big brands through the use of brand theatre. In the last four years the industry heavyweights have created a name for this marketing tactic so marketing departments, media & advertising agencies could understand it & buy it. They called it brand experience.

In 1998 when I first started in this brand theatre game it was called promotion or PR. You’d find a lot of big brands wanting to do a sampling program or re-creating a TVC idea & reproducing it in a brand theatre experience. Back then, even the internet was relatively new so any kind of experience-based engagement was very different. I’d come from a performance background including theatre/TV and film acting, directing & producing along with a voice career behind a microphone which included commercial radio, TV presenting and live MC/compering at gigs & product launches.

I remember as a youngster (in my teens), I was involved in a theatre group where we performed plays at large auditorium on Auckland’s north shore. We never had a marketing or promotional budget to get NEW customers to our shows so we simply dressed up in wacky outfits (costume department supplied) & performed mini-shows or snippets of the play we were about to put on. We went into the local community (a 10k radius of the auditorium) on 3-4 Saturday’s leading up to opening night. We’d take flyers with us, perform for 10 minutes & then give out some literature. While theatre & entertainment was the winner, we got to engage new customers & gave them an opportunity to choose to see us.

Since then I’ve worked for some of Australia’s & the world’s biggest brands including Coca-Cola, 3 Mobile, Cadbury Schweppes, Queensland Tourism, The Winter Olympics, Nokia, Foxtel, Johnson and Johnson, Toyota, National Foods, Channel 7, Nestle, Warner Bros, Bacardi Lion, Telstra, Sony, Kraft, McDonalds, Pepsi, Optus, Diageo, Vodafone, Arnotts, Suncorp and Unilever.

What’s Brand Experience?

Put simply it’s an opportunity for your customers ‘to choose’ to experience your brand – three dimensionally. Unlike TV, radio or newspaper advertising which is a tell me, sell me approach to engaging your customers & only one or two dimensional; a brand experience allows your customers to touch, see, smell, hear & taste your brand in their environment. The golden rule in brand experience is the customer chooses to engage your brand, in their environment. Another term for brand experience is experiential marketing. They’re one & the same.

Connecting to consumers

With so many emerging technologies in today’s world, it’s changed the way customers talk, listen, how they act, how they buy and what they expect from brands & marketers. There are new customers from Generation Z & Y that don’t engage brands through traditional advertising channels. Gen X and baby boomers are also connecting with these technologies & in doing so choose to not engage those traditional channels where the marketer expects them to be reached. So reaching them is going to require different strategies. Thus the rules of engagement have changed. Companies that embrace these new technologies will either live or die, not by their brand promises but how the use brand experience to engage & provide value to their customers.

Why brand experience works

When we truly experience something that’s meant for us (or targeted to us), there’s a bond or an affinity that is created. You know what it’s like when you try a new brand of soap or soup and it feels or tastes great AND they run a competition (targeted to you) and you just love the brand even more so. It becomes a brand that’s relevant to you; memorable, sensory, emotional and meaningful. Given that we see (and hear) so many advertising messages each day, if a brand has the nous to get in front of us without us realising that it’s in front us AND  we experience it, the likelihood of us engaging or purchasing that brand in the future is increased dramatically. Customers want their brands to dazzle them, touch their hearts and stimulate their minds in positive brand experiences THEY WILL REMEMBER.

Done correctly, a brand will allow the experience to run its course & then further that experience in other ways.  They might send us to a website, to enter a competition or an instant win so it heightens the experience. While integration is ideal, it may be cost prohibitive and it depends on the how deep the initial experience is. They say in the ad world – the deeper the insight, the deeper the experience. It also depends on the brands’ objectives.

What brand experience isn’t?

Handing out flyers on a footpath promoting a sale is not experiential. That’s promotion. Spruiking outside the front of a retail store is not experiential. That’s promotion. Using promotional staff wearing branded t-shirts to engage shoppers in a retail environment showing the latest I-phone is not experiential. That again is a promotion. While these tactics include an experiential component – they all are using the tell me, sell me approach. You may engage with the brand as a result of the hearing/seeing one of these approaches but it’s not a direct experience.

Good Brand Experience

Inspiring, thrilling and insightful brand experiences can be created for any market category, for any age group or psychographic in any time period. It is easier to do with brands that instil an emotional connection such as the car industry, food, music, film and fashion. You’d probably see more alcoholic beverages using brand experience to engage their discerning public. Any product that requires a hands-on engagement is perfect for experiential marketing. Electronics, computers, financial services etc. It doesn’t have to be a big budget exercise but it certainly helps to be creative, almost revolutionary in your thinking & how you present your brand to your customers. Anything is possible. They key factor is where are your customers or where does your customer journey each day?

 My personal favourites

The following three campaigns, lead by some leading exponents in the Australian experiential world, captured the imagination of their customers and picked up an award or two for their efforts. 

Campaign: The Berlei Uplifting Tour of Australia                

Client: Bonds

Experiential Agency: Maverick                  

http://www.effies.com.au/awards_winners.aspx?year=2009&id=14&wid=50&awardType=EFFIE

 

Campaign: Free Ride, Get Inside                                                              

Client: Tourism New Zealand

Experiential Agency: PLAY Communication                          

http://www.playcommunication.com.au/

 

Campaign: Tooheys New World Record                                

Client: Lion Nathan

Experiential Agency: Momentum Worldwide                     

http://www.momentumww.com.au/

 

The abovementioned campaigns were all created by a collaboration of thinking across many agencies and client decision makers. There’s considerable work that goes on behind the scenes yet makes the end result so seamless to the end consumer.  These agencies deal with big budget clients who want a strong return on their investment however brand experience needn’t be costly – just creative & connecting.

More & more companies are seeing the benefit of brand experience within their marketing mix so in turn more & more brand experience agencies are being created around the globe as clients demand this thinking.

Market Opportunities

The one industry that could really benefit from brand experience is retailing. I mentioned before that fashion is a wonderful emotionally connecting market for consumers yet retail still do nothing to engage their customers than put a sale sign in the window. With so many retailers competing for one customer there are so many compelling, engaging experiences that can be created near or in front of a shop or in the window so customers can fully experience you & your retailing point of difference. It’s not just about the brand that sells in that shop but how customers can connect with your personalised shopping service they so desperately want. It’s not just for the big retailers but those who take casual leasing spaces in shopping malls or sell jewellery & food at markets or even restaurateurs. They can all benefit from presenting their brands using an experiential methodology. I can feel another post coming just on this subject.

Getting started

We’re often connected to forums or groups that focus on our industry. Use these resources. If they’re not helpful, join another group so as to find out how to best get your business using this technology. We all have ideas for our business to grow. I like using my ‘Little Book of Big Ideas’. Write them down. Share them with people in your network. After working in marketing & advertising agencies for 10 years; if I had a dollar for every idea we bandied about for a prospective campaign (but didn’t use), I’d be very wealthy. Understand your customers. Who? Where? What do they like to do in their spare time? Research them & find insights, deep insights that connect them with your brand. Then the fun can start!

What do you think of brand experience & the opportunities for small to medium business?