What’s Hot at Ketchum - Perspectives - Ketchum's Online Communications Quarterly

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2005 > Issue 1

Greetings from
Ray Kotcher

Global Roundtable:
How to Build Brand Magnetism and Believers

Global Roundtable:
Building Brand Believers Among Women 25 to 54

Brand Believers for the Hostess Twinkie

Street Smarts

What’s Hot at Ketchum

•	Ketchum senior partner and CEO Ray Kotcher maintains that a critical challenge for public relations and the entire marketing communications community centers on mastering how to build brand believers who stay loyal.

•	Douglas Atkin, author of The Culting of Brands, and three other brand-marketing experts look at how best to communicate a brand’s magnetism to consumers and how to avoid damaging a brand icon.

•	Listen to a podcast in which Douglas Atkin chats about how to build brand believers.

•	Kodak’s director of worldwide advertising and other experts on marketing to women explore how to build brand warriors among women ages 25 to 54.

•	A group of young Ketchum professionals, the creative ImagiNation, dishes up an array of ways to bolster the Hostess Twinkie brand.

•	Heard of Twinsumer, offline marketing and teen shadowing? They’re among cutting-edge brand-marketing trends in Street Smarts.

•	eKetchum Director Adam Brown takes you into the world of blogs and podcasts as he welcomes you to Ketchum Personalized Media.

Let’s Talk of Blogs and Podcasts, of RSS and SEO

Ketchum has launched a global offering that advises organizations about the fast-emerging world of online and wireless media — the micro-media marketplace of blogs, podcasts, and search engine optimization, among others. With Ketchum Personalized Media, organizations can reach individuals with the right message at the right time in the right format.

Ketchum Personalized Media seeks to dispel the conflicting information and anxiety that exists about how to incorporate these new online technologies into traditional communications programs. The initial offering helps organizations with five of the new media tools:

•	Blogs: Online conversations, diaries and commentaries of their owners on a variety of topics.

•	Podcasting: Web-based broadcast medium in which audio files are made available online.

•	Really Simple Syndication, or RSS: Method for ensuring broad distribution of blogs and podcasts by delivering information upon request directly to those who sign up to receive it.

•	Search Engine Optimization, or SEO: Influencing the order that links appear on the results pages of key online search engines.

•	Mobile Marketing: Delivery of a wide variety of marketing information via mobile phones anytime and anywhere.

Already, Ketchum employs a number of tools from the Ketchum Personalized Media arsenal on behalf of clients that include Aetna, Canned Food Alliance, Cingular Wireless, Cox Communications, Kimberly-Clark, Novartis Ophthalmics and Staples, among others. Paul Rand, partner/global chief development and innovation officer, and Jon Higgins, partner/CEO, Ketchum Europe, lead the offering globally.

Reflecting its global emphasis, Ketchum Personalized Media is organized around three global product managers and five regional product managers throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. For more information about Ketchum Personalized Media, visit www.ketchum.com/personalizedmedia.

Adam Brown, director of the eKetchum digital media group — who has more than a decade of experience managing and developing Web-based and other digital media projects and is a blog author himself — offers further insights into Ketchum Personalized Media and the current environment for this non-traditional media. These questions and answers are excerpts from recent interviews Adam has had about Ketchum Personalized Media.

Ketchum just launched its personalized media service — and you are the head of two of the five service offerings (blogs and SEO). What are your goals and plans for the practice?

The whole idea with these five service offerings, or 'buckets,' is that the buckets will evolve. In a year from now, those buckets might change, but we will evolve with them, offering our clients what they need. There are so many other technologies and ways that people are going to be communicating that we haven't thought of. There are so many flavors — just in blogs, we have Vlogs, Moblogs, Audioblogs, and others. Blogs are the cool and sexy thing right now — for good reason — but there is going to be something cooler and sexier soon, and we need to be aware of that.

With blogs, we want to help our clients do three things: monitor the blogosphere (and other online communities), which we are doing with a partnership with Intelliseek (creator of Blogpulse and other great reporting and measurement tools). Second, KPM will counsel clients on how and when to respond to the online communities. Right now, the blogosphere is risk-averse to working with marketing and PR firms, and the past year has seen several marketing firms try to work with bloggers with varying degrees of success.

Third, KPM will help our clients develop and maintain blogs. Now, we are of the opinion that there are times when a client wants to do a blog yet it's not appropriate. There are better ways to communicate online, even with other types of two-way, online communities. We can ensure the appropriate message gets out there, and control the message (a foundation of PR).

Why did Ketchum decide to launch a personalized media service?

The unique thing about KPM is that we combined the services into one program. They all work with each other. RSS and blogs and podcasts and SEO — those are all tied in together. SEO is a great tactic and strategy to drive people to the other three. KPM is new, but we've been doing parts of KPM for some time.

Mobile communications is cutting edge — the latest in marketing communications, which fits into how there are now new avenues for communications.

KPM is about letting people get the information where they want, when they want and how they want it. This changes the way we share information with reporters, with the public. This changes the way we can go to the public, in a timely fashion.

What would be your response to someone who says that online media and traditional media are two different beasts and that you can't be consistent on both?

It is a different beast. I think blogs are about an online dialogue. You have a couple of different teams — ad agencies, Web shops, boutique agencies, and PR firms like Ketchum, with KPM — trying to step in front of prospective clients and say, 'We're best suited to help you with this new tool.' If you take blogs down to what they are — online conversations — PR embodies that more than those other tools. It's about creating dialogues and changing someone's emotions and feelings about something.

Do you find when working with other members at Ketchum and talking with clients, that they want PR professionals to handle blog strategy?

A lot of our clients aren't sure to whom they should go. Even at a Fortune 100 company, if you asked executives which discipline owns the management of online content, they would be scratching their heads. If one of those companies had people picketing its headquarters with signs and chants, the executives would pick up their phones and call their PR firm immediately for a crisis-communications plan.

Well, the same thing is happening every minute of every day online on message boards, forums, blogs, and enter-brand-name-here-sucks.com. There's certainly an educational component here to inform our clients about the situation, show them one of the key pieces of this is monitoring and measuring, and counseling them on how and when to respond. Because, in some cases, it's better not to respond.

What's a general situation where it wouldn't be prudent to respond?

When monitoring the blogosphere, you have to identify what's being said and who has said it. Does this person have credibility? Is this person influential? Who heard it? You want to make sure you're not responding to information out there that may come around to bite you. You have to remember that whenever you put anything online, it will be there forever. It's not like a traditional news cycle where, in 48 hours, people mostly forget about it. Something that you may have responded to on a post two or three years ago may queue to the top of a search listing.

Is Ketchum planning its own KPM blog? What is its mission?

Yes, we are planning to do a blog focusing on our point of view on what personalized media is and how it is affecting PR. We won't venture far off that main mission, one that allows us to share our opinions and insights on how all this is changing the communications landscape.

We want to create and be part of the PR conversation in blogs, to share our ideas and thoughts with current and potential clients.

Anything to add?

The whole industry is at a crossroad — anyone can jump on board and realize that everything is changing. We as individuals, as PR firms, we are going to make missteps. It is the wild frontier, but we need to focus on using the new medium, and less on pointing fingers at each other.

We need to use our collective energies to own this, and we need to see our trade associations such as PRSA and IABC take the big step and embrace these new tools and own them for public relations and communications.

•	2004, Issue 2: Unlocking Corporate Communications...

•	2004, Issue 1: Lessons Learned...

•	2003, Issue 2: The Changing Face of Marketing

•	2003, Issue 1: The First 100 Days of 2003

•	2002, Issue 2: Focusing on Innovation

•	2002, Issue 1: David Maister Interview (PDF).

Additional Reading on Building Brand Believers

BOOKS

The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, by Douglas Atkin, Portfolio Hardcover, published June 2004

Brandchild: Remarkable Insights Into The Minds Of Today's Global Kids And Their Relationships With Brands, by Martin Lindstrom, Butterworth-Heinemann, published November 2004.

Building Brands & Believers: How to Connect with Consumers Using Archetypes, by Kent Wertime, Wiley Publishers, published January 2003.

How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, by Douglas B. Holt, Harvard Business School Press, published September 2004.

Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, by Kevin Roberts, powerHouse Books, published April 2004.

The Power of Cult Branding: How 9 Magnetic Brands Turned Customers Into Loyal Followers (and Yours Can, Too), by Matthew W. Ragas and B.J. Bueno, Crown Business, published June 2002.

ARTICLES

Americans Continue to Be Loyal to National Brands, Marketing Today, Aug. 24, 2005.

Brand Rehab: How Companies Can Restore a Tarnished Image Knowledge @ Wharton, September 7-20, 2005

The Everyday Life of Consumer Brands, NOP World Perspectives, Spring 2005

Marketing Spending Effectiveness: How to Win in a Complex Environment, McKinsey & Co. White Paper

BLOGS

Marketing to a Specified Group