The Power of the Tribe

When you hear the word ‘tribe’, you might associate it with ‘primal’, ‘animalistic’, ‘caveman’ or, perhaps like me, you may recall Bruce Parry’s infamous documentary and the piercing of an oh-so-tender body part. Either way, tribes aren’t necessarily what you would associate with marketing, yet it’s the latest lingo used primarily to explain the power of brand advocates.

‘Brand Tribes’, as I like to call them, are being created all around us by a huge number of corporations. Ikea has created fashionista furniture tribes; Apple, a tribe of technology fans; Harley Davidson, a tribe of hardcore bikers; Starbucks, a tribe of culture and coffee enthusiasts, and so on.

Tribes work positively for brands because they like to spread the word, making decisions based on what their friends say, or ‘like’, or digg and so on. If you can gather an enthusiastic tribe based on your brand’s offering, you can rely on them to become brand adorers, increasing your ‘Brand Tribe’ population by the minute and thus significantly raising awareness of your services.

Tribes live within the dark corners of Facebook and other social media channels, ultimately gaining more control over how your brand is perceived than the Marketing Manager himself. That said, it’s important that once a tribe is established, brands must create a constant dialogue, interaction and value exchange with them to keep them interested and engaged. This can include interacting with them directly and instantly over Facebook, or sending them offers and discounts for their loyalty.

Making your ‘Brand Tribe’ feel special and appreciated will do wonders for your reputation, helping to grow your brand recognition organically and with little extra cost.

RPM Helps the Big Deal

On Monday morning, the RPM boardroom was filled with enthusiastic students, all part of ‘The Big Deal’ project. The Big Deal is an enterprise competition for students from disadvantaged backgrounds identified as having high potential, and a number of RPM volunteers helped mentor them over ten weeks.

Teams of students compete against each other to develop business plans, which they then pitch at an exciting Dragons' Den event. The successful team wins a weekend business trip of a lifetime to New York.

Over the course of the day, Hugh took them through the fundamentals of marketing and the history of RPM, with follow-up talks from our Head of Creative, Neil Hooper, and guidance from our Digital and Planning departments.

We wish them the best of luck in their final presentation!

The Big Deal Joins RPM

RPM has been working with organisation 'The Big Deal', a ten-week enterprise competition where teams of students, with the aid of a mentor, compete against each other to develop business plans, which are then pitched at a final event. On Monday 23rd May, RPM's respective team will be visiting the RPM offices to meet the mentoring team and go through their presentations. As well as help from CEO Hugh and Managing Director Dom, other representatives from our Planning, Digital, Creative and PR departments will be offering advice and guidance to the teams.

The Big Deal programme was launched to encourage children and young people aged 0 to 25 to get involved in making decisions that affected them and their friends in youth groups, schools, families and communities across Northern Ireland. The project is a £4 million initiative funded through the Big Lottery Fund under its Northern Ireland Young People’s Fund programme.

London International Documentary Film Festival

I headed down to the London International Documentary Film Festival this week to check out the latest short films from a whole host of directors. The overall aim of the festival, now in its fifth year, is to promote new talent, provide a platform for debate and provoke critical discussion. It’s the largest documentary festival in the UK with a huge programme of 140 films from 44 different nations.

The evening I attended was called ‘A Conversation in Film’, and seven short films were played in succession. The topics covered were simple yet really interesting, including what we think about during a cigarette break, an insight into the different people who frequent a launderette, a touching interview with a mother who lost her son in the war, and behind the scenes at an East End bakery.

The films were hosted in the back room of the Roxy Bar & Screen, and the other venues are spread throughout London. The festival runs until May 28th, and you can buy tickets here.

Dave Squires on Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing has probably been talked about for the last ten years, and it’s only within the last year that it's started to come about. Things such as Sky Mobile on your TV is fantastic, and the apps they’ve got are brilliant, but I think we’re still a little bit behind the curve here. We will get on board with it when things such as Facebook places and Facebook deals really start to kick off. If users are out and about somewhere, they are able to use this to check into a location and get a voucher for where they are on their mobile, straight away.

A brand that is particularly good at this kind of thing is Starbucks, which has something like 20 million fans on Facebook. It is particularly good at mobile marketing. In the States, this is much more how things are done than they are over here at the moment. The difficulties you’ve got are making sure you have a network for fulfilment. So, for example, if you’re doing a deal for your customers, you have to make sure you have a national network of places that can be fulfilled. Starbucks is easy as there’s one on every corner, but how do you do a mobile campaign if you’re a small chain? How do you target it so that you’re really going to be talking to people in your outlets? There are mechanisms to do that, but you need to make sure that’s covered off before you begin blasting out great big messages to people.

An example of how this could work, and something we’ve been looking at over the last few weeks, is checking-in within our Sky Ride campaign. The idea is that you take part in a bike trip around a particular city, and participants can ‘check-in’ at various destinations and stop-off points around the route. Once you arrive, you might get some content to your phone, saying, ‘thank you for checking-in, you now have VIP access to the picnic in Hyde Park’, or something along those lines. So, once you've checked-in along the route, you’ll get various deals or certain access or exclusive stuff for doing so. That’s a kind of work in progress example of how we’re thinking of using mobile and location-based marketing.

On a broader mobile basis, the thing that really isn’t in place yet is that about 50% of UK companies haven’t repurposed their website for mobile use. This means they’ve only built their websites to work on computers, so when you log on to it using your mobile, the website appears only as a tiny version. In terms of making mobile marketing appealing, I think as long as there’s a value exchange, consumers will be willing to give their number to a brand. You have to incentivise data capture in this way, otherwise consumers will not be willing to hand over their details.

RPM Press Galore!

We received a whole host of press coverage this month, from the exciting news of our Cow & Gate win as well as the current Sky DSO Roadshow our team has been busy working on. As a result, RPM starred in titles including Promotional Marketing, Marketing Clout, Event Mag, Pitch, The Drum and Field Marketing.

Project 1p

The idea of trading with other people is not a new concept, yet in an increasingly transactional environment based around money exchanges, we have seen many brands utilising the bartering system. Australian beer brand XXXX launched The Boat Building Project, another launched The Beer Exchanging Project and currently there is Project 1p.

Since January this year, blogger 'Luke' launched Project 1p. The aim is to turn a 1p coin into something of greater value, simply through trading. The project ends on New Year’s Eve 2012, by the end of which Luke hopes to end up with something worth more than 1p.

So, what has happened so far? Luke, open to any offers for his 1p coin, managed to trade the coin for 3 fish. This was then traded for a guitar; the guitar for a bike; the bike for £50; and most amazingly, the £50 got him a plot of land measuring 10m² in Bulgaria. This was then traded for a custom-made metal object, which was swapped for a French yurt holiday, which in turn was swapped for a portrait of Nick Hornby made of 2,500 1p coins. The most recent swap was the portrait for a wedding dress. This project just goes to show that you should never underestimate the power of a 1p coin.

If you have any offers for Luke, then visit http://project1p.wordpress.com/

The Heineken Mirror

Heineken is showing its digital creativity, launching an interactive mirror in Milan that allows users to create light art with their own body gestures. Celebrating Heineken's new 'light up the night' bottle, the mirror was unveiled at the Salone del Mobile club in the fashionable Italian city. Anyone who stands in front of the mirror can create their own light images using their body, arms, hands and of course the bottle itself. Certain poses trigger predefined shapes, such as the Heineken star that features on the bottle. This is a very cool activation that combines the drink's surroundings with a memorable occasion.