Not surprisingly, when talking about current challenges, we had lots of conversation around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

For Marketing to support that, one thing we need to do is engineer our content to make people want to share it.  But how?

It turns out two Wharton professors already looked at what makes people share, with an investigation of what makes people share New York Times articles.  Independent readers described articles using a number of adjectives, and then the professors looked at how likely the articles were to be in the list of top shared articles.

Short answer?  The most shared articles are those that inspire awe.

(In case you’re interested — number two: things that inspire anger, three: practical utility, four: emotionality, tied for five: anxiety and surprise, bringing in the rear: positivity.  Things that inspire sadness are much less likely to be shared.  You can find much more in the – ironically – widely shared New York Times article about the paper here)

What does it mean to be awe-inspiring?  In the New York Times, this generally meant it was a complicated, intellectual article about science, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”  As one of the authors says, “You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

At the highest level, here’s how the authors defined awe-inspiring: “Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.”

From a practical, B2B marketing perspective, what does this mean?  More points for commercial teaching as a strategy.  What ‘awe-inspiring’ means in a consumer context is that they’ve learned something new and fascinating about their world.

What that means in a business context is they need to learn something new and fascinating about their business.  This requires a careful cocktail of surprising rational information about issues customers care about delivered with an emotional punch to grab attention.

If you do this, your customers will tell each other about your insights.

MLC members, check out one of our upcoming sessions to learn more about how to build an insight-driven content engagement strategy.

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.

The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”.  Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:

Click Image to Enlarge

At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.

But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:

1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.

2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.

3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.

Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.

A necessary function of content that can convert the buying center is establishing the supplier’s credibility.  This is key since decision influencers must feel comfortable sharing content with their peers.  Previously a close supplier-customer relationship might have built the needed credibility – now, marketers achieve it through content.

One approach is using social proof.  This concept in organizational theory suggests that when we are uncertain about a decision, we are strongly influenced by choices we see peers make.  A supplier can tap into social proof by showing prospective customers peers who are in similar situations and choosing the supplier’s services.  This could be done with tactics like online communities, case studies or word-of-mouth initiatives.

One of my favorite examples comes from Qwest Communications.  Qwest shares interview videos of current customers with prospects.  To keep the customer interviewees easy to relate to, Qwest stays away from the slick commercial-like style you’ll find in a lot of testimonials.  Interview videos are unscripted, minimally edited, and include responses to questions like “What could Qwest do better?”.

Another approach to establishing credibility is providing customized content – that demonstrates your understanding of the customer’s business and the value you can create for them.  A custom implementation plan, benchmarked diagnostic or value calculator might fall into this category.

A good example here comes from the FedEx ValuePoint calculator.  This tool allows customers to create custom savings predictions for multiple scenarios, and suggests case studies from companies with similar profiles.  The fact that the tool uses a company’s own data builds some initial credibility, but a lot also depends on the way FedEx created the tool itself.  There are plenty of value calculators simply based on convenient supplier assumptions, but FedEx used empirical data to inform weightings used in the calculator.  These weightings are completely visible to the prospect and can be adjusted.  With this tool prospects are able to run multiple scenarios using a variety of assumptions, which builds confidence in the value.

One of the sharpest subversive ads of the year (a humble opinion) is available at http://www.tubgin.com/, and click on “A short, short story”.

These brands offer just a few examples of a broader trend in tapping directly into the edgier, snarkier sentiments of today’s consumer (Whitney had to tell me what snarky means).

Iconoculture—MLC’s new partner for bringing real-time consumer insights to our members—has picked up on this trend in its most recent research on “Subversive Branding.”  Iconoculture’s findings point marketers in an interesting direction: while subversive branding can breathe new life into our marketing messages, it also runs the risk of alienating consumers.

Iconoculture offers a few simple factors to consider before integrating subversion into your brand strategy:

• Category Norms: Is subversion common in your category? Is it rare? If you’re the only subversive brand in the category, that may offer an incredible opportunity to reach a niche, but it also may be a warning sign—anyone raising their hand to be the first “angry” life insurance provider?
• Target Audience: Will subversive marketing be novel or familiar to your target audience?  Will it connect with their values and attitudes? Will it pull in more consumers than it turns off?
• Consumer Involvement: Are consumers already doing subversive things with your brand? Can you embrace or build on what’s happening?  If so, it may be a sign that consumers are ready to see your brand’s dark side.

For more on subversive branding strategies, and the consumer values that are opening the door for marketers to show their dark side, MLC Members can tune into our upcoming webinar on subversive branding hosted by Iconoculture’s consumer strategist team.

We typically see three modes of content delivery:

1) Self-Directed –Customers spend significant time absorbing content online or connecting with peers before they ever contact the company directly.  This heightens the importance of deliberately designing interactions that make it easy for customers to digest insight and want to deepen the commercial relationship without someone physically present to make these connections explicit.   Downloading a white paper is too passive – it too easily turns into a one-off interaction where a customer absorbs content but feels no pull to move forward in the buying process.  Marketing needs to engineer self-directed insight consumption with an eye towards progressing customers along the purchase funnel.

2) Automated – Customers are clearly doing a lot of information gathering their own, but there’s still a role to play as far as what content you push through online promotions, newsletters, etc.  The problem is that most B2B marketers send the same content to everyone, but buyers now expect to get personalized offers that correspond to where they are in the buying process in real time.  The net result: a lot of clutter.   Fortunately, the rise of marketing automation technologies have made it a lot easier for suppliers to sequence content such that they hit the right people with the right content at the right time.  Content should take into account the groups you need to influence within the buying center and the stages they go through in the buying process, mapping content accordingly.

3) In-Person– One of the most potent ways to deliver teaching is in a face-to-face interaction, but it’s also the most “expensive” of the consumption options given limited time and resources from both the customer and sales rep perspectives .  There’s a very deliberate sequence to how a sales conversation should unfold to make the most of whatever face time reps manage to get.  It begins by provoking the customer, either by reframing initial assumptions or exposing areas of underappreciated risk. Then, break down the underlying problems behind this previously unknown or underappreciated issue.  Finally, build back the customer’s confidence with an eye to how your products and services solve the exposed issue.  Creating this emotional progression helps reps “choreograph” a conversation that delivers insight with greatest impact.

MLC members, learn more about engaging customers with marketing content at one of our upcoming executive networking sessions.

We asked her how she did it.

How high do you think the stakes are with social media?

“Not to sound melodramatic, but it’s relevancy.  It’s ‘Will we exist or not?’  If we don’t do this, someone else will.”

What changes has USA TODAY made as a result of social media?

“We’ve had to change our mindset to put ourselves in the middle of conversations.  We now cultivate customer-to-customer interactions by allowing customers to blog on our site and post directly on our Facebook wall without editorial review, which many of our major competitors don’t allow.  On Facebook, we tee up open questions designed to spark discussion between our followers. We also have 27 online communities.”

What are you doing as a CMO?

“I’ve been getting journalists and peers onboard and reassuring everyone that our brand is strong enough to evolve and stretch in these social dimensions.  I tried to provide a vision of why we needed to change and I got my staff to provide tactical support.  I put one member of my team in charge of teaching the journalists about social media and doing the hand-holding.  I said, ‘Make training your life for the next six months.’  He literally had lunch meetings with everyone.”

How did you get buy-in for social media adoption?

“First, we did comprehensive research on our brand equity to clarify why consumers like us and understand the brand’s ability to stretch.   Everyone buys into the tenets of this brand study, so I quote it all the time. Second, I showed how our activities would drive commercial results.  I was careful not to ask for mandates or incremental resources initially.  I simply asked for access to our journalists.  Finally, I shifted one person on my own team from traditional PR to social media and cancelled our wire services.  But if anything, we now get more – and better – PR at less cost.”

How did you get journalists to change their habits?

“Like any change initiative, you find influencers. For us it was travel journalists.  We asked them to blog and then got them to share their successes and tips.  From there, social took on a life of its own for the journalists.”

How long did it take you to see traffic/results?

“We went from zero to 100 twitterers in a year and have already seen a meaningful boost in traffic to our website as a result.”

How do you keep up-to-date?

“I rely on my youngest staff.  They get the scoop on new platforms well before popular media, or even some of the online social news sites.”

MLC B2C members, learn how other CMOs are spearheading social media efforts at our 2010 meeting series “Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media”. For more information or to register, click here.

Meeting Dates

17 June | New York

14 July  | Chicago

25 August | Sydney

21 September | London

12 October | San Francisco

One conversation that stood out for us, though, was a conversation we had with the marcomm team at TELUS last year (TELUS is one of Canada’s top telecom service providers).  We were discussing their “Who Knew” marketing communications campaign (a submission from last year’s B2B MarComm Campaign Awards), which was an initiative that targeted influencers and decision-makers at medium and large businesses in Ontario.

Following best practice, TELUS mapped their marcomm touchpoints to the target’s “typical day.”  Touchpoints included elevator wraps in prospects’ buildings, billboards in very specific locations in Toronto’s business district and key travel locations (e.g., Toronto Island Airports) and SMS messages to reach customers on the commute.

However, where TELUS really stood out here was HOW they identified the best touchpoints for their mix.  TELUS capitalized on the knowledge of their local sales-forces, who were able to point out the specific elevator shafts in the specific buildings where an ad would have the greatest potential to be seen by a set of prospects or customers in the target market.  So what is great here is how efficient the media spend was as a result of being able to capitalize on internal intelligence.

As a bonus, by taking this approach when selecting their mix, TELUS ensured that the campaign was fully integrated with one of its other key communication channels – namely the sales force – who capitalized on the campaign extensively as they felt both enfranchised and knowledgeable about the communications effort.

Do you have your own example of B2B MarComm success from the past year and a half?  Submit your entry into our 2010 B2B MarComm Campaign Awards by June 30^th, and receive an extra ticket to our October Summit in Las Vegas.

The best companies embrace heterogeneity instead of aiming for global consistency.  They assess each region’s individual needs in order to tailor capability goals and training accordingly.

To determine needs, companies rate local teams’ social media maturity against local consumers’ maturity and size the gap to close. Self-assessment surveys are the quickest way to determine maturity.  Ideally, questions on marketing maturity should cover agency capabilities as well as internal expertise, while questions on consumer maturity should cover how much data is available on consumers’ media preferences/habits.  Surveys are usually administered once or twice a year and should evolve as the company’s knowledge of social media grows. MLC’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic is a good example of the kinds of questions to ask. Members can administer this survey in multiple regions at no cost.

By ranking each region’s internal (marketing) vs. external (consumer) sophistication on a simple 3-point scale (low, medium, high), companies can quickly identify leading and lagging countries. This enables central marketing to:

a)     Prioritize groups with the greatest need for improvement by identifying those in which marketers’ use of social lags farthest behind consumers’,

b)    Customize training and resources to each team’s individual needs by creating a menu of training modules,

c)     Bucket countries with similar needs/opportunities together for joint training,

d)    Identify teams pioneering particular capabilities and task them with teaching the broader organization (e.g., South Africa may be leading the way in mobile marketing, while South Korea may be advanced at online community management)

e)     Set locally relevant performance targets (rather than unrealistic standard targets) and track progress.

MLC members, for more information on global capability building, please see our webinar on Microsoft’s digital Center of Excellence.

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much?

Well, I’ve tasted it.  Several times.  The verdict?  It’s a welcome improvement, but not a nearly-double-your-market-cap-in-three-months kind of improvement.  Essentially, it tastes like they took the old crust and rubbed some garlic butter on it.

So here’s the question: How did a firm spend millions of marketing dollars improving a product, settle on some pretty incremental changes, and translate that into an 84% leap in stock price?

Simple: it’s not what you sell—it’s how you sell.

Now, my point is not that Dominos’ marketing dollars didn’t result in an improved product—they almost certainly did.  But an improved product wasn’t the whole point.  The real reason the company spent millions of marketing dollars was… to say that it had spent millions of marketing dollars.  Why?  Because the message those marketing dollars convey is not only that Domino’s had perfected (or at least improved) its pizza, but also “we listened to you.”

It’s a perfect example of not selling on product features and benefits alone.  Weiner explains:

“I spent a lot of time thinking about how to change the perception of people who didn’t buy Domino’s. We talked to them, and read their blogs, and this is what they were saying. And I knew that, other than my mom, no one would care about “new and improved.” So if we just said, “Hey, this is a new and improved pizza,” we would not have gotten the doubters to try it.”

In other words, Domino’s isn’t saying, “buy our pizza because it has a garlic crust that intoxicates taste buds and stimulates serotonin production.”  Rather, they’re creating an experience around doing business with the company: “you told us our pizza tasted like cardboard, we took time to listen and made changes, so give us a try again!”

The Council’s work on marketing communications has always stressed the primacy of client-side creative brief writing. Many heads of advertising will tell us they can ascertain the relative success of a campaign in advance simply by reading the creative brief sent to the agency. Our research shows that the best briefs contain three can’t-miss elements:

1. A precise target audience beyond demographics, including behavior and psychographic traits

2. A core insight that synthesizes the motivations behind consumer behavior (or non-behavior, as the case may be)

3. A single communications task that will move the audience from their current attitude/behavior to the desired attitude/behavior.

Knowing these, it’s difficult not to look at odd-ball television ads and reverse engineer them back to the brief that started it all, wondering if the ad’s ’success’ will merely win it a Cleo or truly accomplish the communications task. Given the marketing and advertising know-how of this blog’s readers, I’d like to start a series designed to get your take on exactly these types of ads, using the key elements of a creative brief as grading criteria. The first ad that came to mind is Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ video that debuted on YouTube in February, made it to television shortly thereafter, and now has nearly six million YouTube views.

The ad is deliberately provocative, and at times, utterly illogical. The actor is speaking directly to females in the commercial, yet the target audience – as stated publicly by Procter & Gamble over the past few years – is teenage males. This audience overlaps tremendously with Unilever’s hyper-sexualized Axe brand. Perhaps the distinction between the two is the addition of the female secondary audience and the impact of that audience on the teenage male purchaser.

So I ask of our readers: does the campaign work? What is the insight behind the campaign that makes it distinct from Axe? Does the associated campaign have a single communications task? Hone your responses by adding a comment above; I’ll add further MLC perspective as the comments expand.There’s no right answer, but this type of thinking can sharpen your saw for the creative briefs you write – ensuring that catchy campaigns also translate to business results.