The (Marketing) Week That Was

If The Voice were a contest for copywriters instead of singers, the team at Firebox would win hands down. Firebox is the sort of etailer that sells heated narwhal slippers alongside toothbrush sanitizers designed to look like ninjas alongside single-serving French presses alongside Abashiri Blue Beer.

The blue beer caught my eye in my Facebook feed the other morning. Not merely because it’s, well, beer that’s a startling blue hue. But because of the brief blurb with which Firebox accompanied the photo: “I’m blue, have a beer or I’ll die, and da ba dee da ba di.”

If you’re lucky, you’re unaware of the frighteningly catchy but utterly inane song titled “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” that Firebox was referencing. I’m not one of the lucky, however, so though the tune immediately lodged itself in my brain, I nonetheless clicked the link to the product.

The copy on the Abashiri product page was just as clever as the Facebook’s blurb, but informative too: “…This striking beer achieves its unique aquamarine hue by using a blend of blue seaweed and locally grown flowers, it even contains water from melted icebergs. To sip this beautiful blue brew is to immerse yourself in the wild and colourful flavours of the frozen Abashiri coastline. Seriously, you're basically drinking the island, soon there'll be nothing left….”

Firebox’s copy voice is consistently cheeky yet fact-based. While the writers clearly aim to entertain, they never forget that job one is to provide shoppers with enough product information to close the sale.

The consistency in terms of voice extends to its Twitter feed too. After reading about the blue beer, I tweeted, “@firebox may have the best copywriters ever.” Within minutes Firebox responded, “We’re also well known for our questionable music tastes, Sherry.” I can’t think of how the brand could have improved upon its reply.

For those reasons, Firebox is our winner of the week. (Cue the kazoos.)

To continue with our Voice metaphor for a moment, two other brands would definitely have been worthy challengers to Firebox. One is the publishing house Penguin. Its newsletters never fail to delight, whether it’s the cute illos of penguins and puffins or the dry humor of its copy, as in this invite to join its reader panel: “Guess what? You love books! You probably knew that already, but thanks to some analytical wizardry and other computerised shenanigans we’ve deduced that you’re one of our most dedicated Penguin Books newsletter openers. Don’t tell the other subscribers but that makes you our favourite...”

Voice is, in fact, what distinguishes Heat from Britain’s myriad other weekly gossip rags. The magazine is snarky, but deep down you know it doesn’t really want to hurt the objects of its ribbing—well, at least not most of them. It’s just a laugh and a lark, and too bad if they can’t take a joke.

Here’s a taste of Heat’s voice, from this week’s email announcing its website redesign: “After a hundred thousand meetings, a million billion printed out redesigns, and an infinite number of articles transferred from the old website to the new one... heatworld.com has a brand new look! And seriously, look at it: so shiny! So colourful! So many celebrity stories to marvel at!” Us magazine (in the States) or Now (one of Heat’s UK rivals) wouldn’t use phrases such as “million billion” and “so shiny!”—either on its pages or in its emails. Heat shows that in a commoditized market (and yes, celebrity gossip has become commoditized), a startlingly different voice is a worthy USP.

[An aside: When I lived in Devon, my Tuesday morning ritual included stopping at Tesco to buy the new Heat (and a chicken-and-bacon sandwich—oh, and some strawberry laces: breakfast of champions and that). Shortly after I returned to the States, the newsstands in Grand Central Station stopped carrying Heat, and I don’t know where I can buy it here in Manhattan. If you can hook me up, please do!]

If there are winners, there have to be losers too. Voice isn’t what let down this web advert from department store Macy’s; simple lack of brain cells did:

“The Great Baby Sale”? With the headline above a photo of a racially diverse selection of four babies, as if to show the variety of colorways you can choose from? And “Save 50% when you buy 2 or more”? Yeah, beneath that it says “select styles from Carter’s, First Impressions, blah blah blah,” but still…

Making matters worse for Macy’s is that it had paid to run on the Daily Mail’s website just below the newspaper’s nav bars and above the headline of its lead story—which happened to be “ ‘She begged me for a baby so she wouldn’t be an old mom and paid $30,000 to our surrogate’…” She probably could have saved a bundle by skipping the surrogate and shopping at Macy’s instead.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, but I’m going to try to get back into the groove. If you have anything cool or heinous you’d like to share, feel free to send it along!

Using Twitter (and Liz Jones) for Good, Not Evil

The Liz Jones in Somalia Twitter feed is a brilliant example of the immediacy of the medium and its unique marketing and messaging possibilities. It’s also damn funny.

Liz Jones, for those who have managed to avoid the British rag the Daily Mail, is a columnist best known for her almost mind-boggling self-absorption. (This blog tallies just a few examples.) Several months after writing ad nauseum about her severe financial straits, which she admits are due largely to her insistence on buying designer garb, exotic vacations, and gourmet treats she can't afford, she penned a detailed account of her £13,145 facelift. Her weekday column is appropriately titled “Liz Jones Moans,” and among her targets are parents who take photos of their offspring, people who use laptops on trains, working women who decide to have children, barbecues, women who can’t afford to hire a cleaner but fail to maintain a spotless home, public transit, and women who fail to sport flattering hairstyles.

To put her in perspective for New Yorkers, she makes the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser look like a font of empathy and human kindness.   

So when the Daily Mail opted to send Jones (“I drive a BMW and never use public transport. I always have the central heating on full and walk around in a T-shirt. I frequently order films on Sky Box Office, watch them for five minutes, then change the channel”) to report on the famine in Somalia, outrage predictably ensued. 

Just days after word of Jones’s assignment hit the media, a blogger who frequently takes aim at the Mail under the handle DMReporter launched @LizJonesSomalia and began posting tweets that are a bit over the top for the real Jones (“Awful nights sleep; the sobbing outside my hotel window was so loud. Without my duck-feather duvet I wouldn't have gotten a wink over 8hrs.”), but not by much.

Just five days after its July 31 launch, the feed has more than 7,000 followers. More impressive, it has already raised nearly £10,000 for the Disasters Emergency Committee’s East Africa Crisis Appeal simply by encouraging Jones haters to donate £2 apiece.

Besides being a wonderful example of how to turn lemons (or rather, a sour-as-a-lemon human being) into lemonade, Liz Jones in Somalia shows that an ad hoc campaign implemented in immediate reaction to an event can generate response—and that Twitter is an ideal conduit for this sort of effort. Followers retweet and beget other followers, who in turn spread the word via Facebook, blogs, and other social media as well. DMReporter himself/herself is encouraging cross-pollination by linking to and referencing @LizJonesSomalia in his/her regular feed, Tumbler account, and the like.

It’s also an example of how to latch on to an anger-inducing subject to produce positive results. We tend to skirt around associating ourselves or our brands with anything remotely negative, for good reason: It can be difficult to control the anger away from ourselves and toward our target. But by offering the audience an alternative to the negative—in this case, using the galvanizing power of Jones for good instead of evil—Liz Jones in Somalia provides a catharsis of sorts for its followers. And in exchange for this sense of relief, the followers reward the provider of said relief with goodwill and loyalty.

I'm Cute; Read Me

Two things you should know before you read this post: I love Iceland, to the point that if, say, a job opportunity arose (hint hint), I’d relocate there in an instance; and I’m a sucker for cute. 

So of course I’ve been absolutely charmed by the Iceland Wants to Be Your Friend social media effort initiated by the Icelandic Tourist Board. There’s a blog; a Twitter feed; a Facebook page; Tumbler, Vimeo, and Flickr accounts—nothing too unusual there. What is unusual, at least to me, is that the content is presented in the first person, as if Iceland were a somewhat naïve, eager, friendly person.

This, for instance, is the confirmation email you receive upon opting in to receive its enewsletter:

Halló there --

and takk for being my new best friend.

I look forward to having you as a friend, and maybe sending you emails once in a while telling you about my places and my people, and the things that [are] happening on me.

(Don't worry, I am not the kind of clingy friend who is always sending you messages when you just want some peace and quiet. And if you ever want to stop being friends, I am very uncomplicated about it. You just click a link and poof.)…

Its Facebook posts are written in the same style. Following Saturday’s eruption of the Grímsvötn volcano, Iceland—yup, that’s the organization’s Facebook moniker, “Iceland”—posted messages such as “My people usually keep calm and carry on when I have volcanic eruptions. (They are used to them, and they know what to do)” and “Are you flying to me in a flying machine today? For updates, follow…” with links to several sources of information. 

I can’t recall any other instance in which the product or service being marketed was anthropomorphized in this way. I’m not talking about the logos but the actual subject of the marketing itself. It’s as if instead of the Ty-D-Bol man exhorting the toilet cleaner’s virtues, the Ty-D-Bol container itself began talking.

While I think the initiative is absolutely delightful, I did wonder if it was perhaps a bit too twee for the mainstream. Then I noticed that it has more than 67,000 Facebook friends (compared with less than 52,000 for a similar venture, Inspired by Iceland) and nearly 7,500 Twitter followers (compared with 2,300 for Iceland Naturally, dedicated to promoting Icelandic companies and events).  

What’s more, people who post on Iceland’s Facebook wall often respond as if it were, indeed, a person. “Hello Iceland, I think I'm in love with you. Even though I did not have the chance to see you in realtime yet. Let's call it something platonic maybe, if that's okay with you?” wrote a young woman from Belgium. A male university student from Scotland posted, “Hi Iceland, Myself and a friend are about to come and walk across you from the far south to the far north.”

The effectiveness of social marketing, according to the pundits, depends on how much of a personal connection people feel with the brand, product, or service being marketed. By portraying Iceland as an individual, one with a distinct and quirky personality, Iceland Wants to Be Your Friend has made that connection with followers. It’s as if the usual intermediary between consumer and product had been removed. 

That perception of greater closeness between consumer and product, or between reader and writer, is why so many novelists used first person instead of third for particular books. Can you imagine Catcher in the Rye or Portnoy’s Complaint or Huckleberry Finn written in the more distancing third person?

Though, of course, not every book could or should be written in the first person. By its nature, first-person narration is limited and unreliable. Iceland Wants to Be Your Friend gets around the latter stumbling block by making the character of Iceland somewhat childlike. But a childlike tone wouldn’t work for most products and services. I know I wouldn’t want to buy, say, my dog’s heartworm medicine or an office desk from a company that positions itself as simple and inexperienced.

So yes, the approach of Iceland Wants to Be Your Friend is difficult, if not impossible, for most other marketers to pull off. But it does indicate that consumers do respond to appropriate whimsy and that injecting an unexpected voice or personality into a brand’s social marketing efforts can not only set the brand apart but also increase response. And it shows that I’m not the only person who responds to cute.  Which is why, in a bald attempt to attract more readers, I opened this post with a photo of the cutest dog I know.