During brand planning one of the first things you do is develop, and/or analyze the SWOT. You look at the company’s strengths, its weakness, opportunities, and threats. It is all encompassing in the business landscape and the consumer landscape as it relates to the brand.

What is missing however, is the consumer landscape of opinions as it relates to your brand and your competition. The consumer‚Äôs perception: the good, bad, and ugly. It’s getting easier to capture this information due to not only the traditional channels of satisfaction surveys, letters to the company, calls to customer service, etc. but also the web. From message boards and blogs to photo-sharing, video, and consumer reviews, the information is available.

Without accurately addressing what people are actually thinking you may miss a key insight. Adding in customer perceptions adds a depth to understanding what your true SWOT is. Call it a p-SWOT for simplicity.

The customer helps inform them all. Without understanding the perceptions in the marketplace it is difficult to accurately make assumptions about your core business, the type of targeting desired for a campaign, where your evangelists are and what they are saying, the gamut. You may miss an opportunity that you identified as a weakness because you’ve misdiagnosed the customer perception.

An easy example of this is a wireless carrier. They are launching a new product and see an opportunity in their exclusive deal with a phone manufacturer, which of course goes in the SWOT. The campaign planning moves forward and its decided they’ll focus on driving people to their website to purchase. Sounds good so far. Except what wasn’t taken into consideration is the majority of customer service calls relate to being unable to complete a purchase online. That information is logged and perhaps looked at by someone above the CSR Director infrequently. So customers either give up and go to a competitor, or, they call / email your customer service and impact your cost centre even further. However, doing a little digging further online, you find on a few forums that it is a problem for Firefox and Safari users and people are upset. Had you known that upfront you would have identified your website compatibility as a weakness and a threat and your launch as an opportunity to potentially reach out to dissatisfied customers. I imagine it would be a more fruitful one as well.

Using the p-SWOT can become a powerful way to continue to reinforce the need for customer collaboration and communication. It can help you be pro-active and innovative vs. reactive and outdated. It puts the customer in the seat next to you helping you navigate. I certainly am trying to put it into practice :)

p-SWOT

Over the last 2 weeks I’ve noticed something about my online habits - they were being driven by primarily offline stimuli or personal silos. This was a significant enough change from the norm for me since, oh, 1995 when I got my first Internet connection. In the past 11 years I’ve surfed the web… clicking on banners, feeling lucky on Google, spending hours comparing prices or looking at vacation locations, Asking Jeeves, clicking on links in emails, blogrolls, message boards, or content on my merry way around the web. In a way I let the medium guide my behaviour and direction of my habits. I passively consumed the content and allowed my experience to be guided by the various entities I encountered.

The last two weeks (at least that’s when I started paying more serious attention) have been, well, a tad different. I’ve been busy catching up at work, I’ve been busy trying to read my RSS feeds & emails, and I’ve been out networking and strategizing in real life. This has left little time for any kind of surfing that wasn’t directly related to my immediate, or short-term needs. I clicked through to the articles that interested me from my email newsletters and bookmarked the ones to come back to. On occasion I followed a link from one of my RSS feeds to another site. Except… for the three TV commercials I saw while taking a break which prompted me to write down the URL’s (yes, with pen & paper!) and visit the websites. The commercials grabbed my attention because they were well executed, catchy, and had a memorable URL. And one prompted me to go out and buy the product (okay, fine, it’s the Trivial Pursuit “Totally 80’s“ board game, I couldn’t resist even if the website was umm, not robust…).

Then there were the four conversations I had offline, that referenced something I googled when I got home (yes Google, I actually googled on Google), and explored in more depth. Two were brand related and confirm the power of WOM, and two were marketing related and confirm that content is king and SEO is more than a nice-to-have.

My web experience morphed into a self-directed one driven by stimuli that was important enough for me to take time to pay attention to and engage with.

As we continue to get more time crunched and content saturated how difficult will it be for companies to get themselves positively featured in my self-directed experience? The goal of social media and engagement is to ensure that happens, but as we’ve talked about at the various industry meet-ups and events, the conversation exists both offline and on and changes daily. A big challenge moving forward will be the ability to successfully integrate the conversations and messages online & offline, while continuing to provide real value for the customer. Focusing on one or the other (and being a medium evangelist vs. a customer evangelist) is counterintuitive to human interaction and behaviour.

[photo credit: olivander on Flickr]

Can you define a “conversation”? And if you can, who decides which is the “right” definition?

Can you have a conversation without being engaged with who you are talking to? Do consumers care if you’re engaged, or if you’re transparent and authentic? Is it a mix?

Is the conversation directed, or guided, or initiated? Do you have to choose one in order to be part of the dance between brand and consumer?

Should the control for the type of conversation rest soley with the consumer?

I ask these questions because recently there have been attempts to define what is a conversation, what is not, and it all seems to me to be a waste of energy. I touched on this before in my post on blogging cornerstones, and the same issues keep popping up surrounding the “correct” way to interact.

A conversation in my opinion occurs when a brand initiaties, listens and responds (or just listens and responds) to their customer or prospect (or in other words, engages with them). It doesn’t matter if the company initiates the conversation by trying to build word-of-mouth around a product (especially if the product is exceptional), sends out relevant and solicited communications, joins a social networking site, or if the CEO starts a blog and solicits open feedback. It’s all about interacting and engaging with consumers. The conversation happens as they want it to, when they want it to, and in whatever medium they choose to engage in.

If the consumer is in control, then they get to define the terms…

[photo credit: dotpolka on Flickr]

We marketers/ ad people have been devoting an awful lot of space on our blogs talking about engaging the community, understanding your customer, engaging in conversations, and all things social media. We’ve rightfully preached about transparency, authenticity, listening. But do we do the same with our direct customers, our clients?

As agency folks we typically work on more than one account, or brand, in our careers (or at one agency) and the expectation for each is that you are immersed in it. You understand the brand ID, the USP, the P&L, the sales cycle, the customer profile, the SWOT, you know, the whole enchilada of the product & the advertising. But what we often fail to do (as client services or creatives), is remember to understand the person we’re pitching or presenting to. How else to explain using a Sony laptop in a pitch for Dell? Or asking Bill Gates what’s on his iPod? Or talking about golf with the woman who just had a baby? Or bringing in a Starbucks when meeting with the Second Cup? [purely hypothetical situations of course...] Do we think the client won’t notice? They do. And it doesn’t help build the trust necessary to help them connect with their customers. If we don’t practice what we preach, why should they listen to us?

We need to be the shining examples of listening and communication… and the devil is always in the details. You wouldn’t let your PPT out the door with the wrong logo in it would you?

[photo credit: dotpolka on Flickr]

Continuing my Toronto culture theme today, I am loving the new National Ballet of Canada contest: Where’s the ballerina?

I received an email last week announcing the first week of the contest, as I have opted in to receive communications from the National. The email was elegant and simple, it matched the branding of the website, and it was compelling. The contest is fantastic & runs over a four week period - win two tickets to the gala opening of The Sleeping Beauty at the new Four Seasons Centre. And the hook… well, what can I say, I’m in love…

A ballerina has been sighted at various locations throughout the city of Toronto. Your job is to identify where she is from 4 multiple choice locations. The “clue” is a beautifully shot black and white video clip set to music from the ballet of the ballerina exploring the location. It’s visually stunning and engaging.

The contest, although simple and to the point, hits all the right privacy marks with opt-outs and policies upfront; and it encourages viral by building in a refer a friend for more chances to win option. Finally, the entry form design is excellent as it’s built into the page and doesn’t ask for more info than they need. In fact, they only ask for name and email address.

Bravo to the National Ballet for using the interactive medium in a intuitive way that speaks directly to the brand, the community, and the art.

Update: Although the campaign is terrific, one way to add depth and buzz would be to tie in the theme into an exclusive grand prize where those users who entered correctly all 4 weeks had an extra chance to participate… perhaps a 24 hour period where an exclusive ‘part 5′ is posted that is more difficult to decipher… with a chance to win tickets to a different ballet, or a pre-show chat with Karen Kain. Once you open the door to connecting so well with your brand and your audience, the possibilities are endless to increase the experience.

[photo credit: foreversouls on Flickr]

Tags: National Ballet of Canada; Where’s the ballerina?;