Public relations consultant /blog

Replacing a well known, trusted and perhaps even loved brand with something new is a high risk strategy in itself, but not enough for Heinz who, under the cover of such a rebrand, attempted to hide a 70 per cent price increase for its baby milk formula. Not surprisingly the move has provoked fury among parents.

As Stuart Bruce reports Heinz Nurture is getting a rough time online, as consumers demand a return to Farley’s. And it’s not the first time Heinz has been accused of wanting to do away with Farley’s, a brand dating back to the 1880s.

Massive price hike aside, it’s difficult to understand the Heinz marketers’ motivation. The claim that Heinz Nurture is different formula to Farley’s is thin as it’s hard to believe Farley’s Rusks haven’t been reformulated in the last 125 years; brands and products evolve. Farley’s is such a strong brand, with so many loyal followers its owner, can’t keep it under control. It’s a brand that conjures up warm and nostalgic childhood memories amongst the parents it’s aimed at. Heinz Nurture, by comparison, sounds rather cold. There must a fair amount of corporate ego behind the move.

Most ironically, it’s the Victorian brand that’s fighting back through new and social media, while the contemporary alternative looks terribly out of date.

Having allowed himself to be puffed by interviewer George Dearsley as the ‘man who invented the ethical stance of the Co-operative Bank’, Simon Williams may need reminding of why Robert Owen’s statue is outside the head office, but he gives an interesting interview below.

Simon Williams enabled the Co-op to rediscover ethics after ‘slogging through the market research cupboard’. It turned out that while most people banked with the Co-op for all the usual reasons, about five per cent chose the Co-op because they thought it was ethically sound. The marketing guru’s reaction – ‘where was that from, what was that all about?’ – will embarrass anyone with a sense of history.

The Co-op, which had been in decline for a couple of decades, had clearly lost touch with its founding moral purpose. Only after rediscovering this and repackaging it for today did it find strategic direction and recover.

Simon Williams reveals that this process of rediscovery was driven more by accident than design, but all’s well that ends well.

Take a walk through Manchester’s Printworks and there’s a good chance your mobile phone will be buzzing. The Printworks has embraced Bluetooth marketing, giving advertisers a chance to deliver messages – like this one for the Hard Rock Café – direct to mobile phones.

But it’s a pretty unsubtle approach.

Not only is bluetooth messaging an intrusive medium likely to annoy, it leaves customers open to Bluejacking; a malicious message, or even virus, could be transmitted to consumers who leave their phones open in the hope of picking up a special offer. While the Printworks has posters displayed encouraging users to accept unsolicited Bluetooth messages, I could see no advice on how to tell which messages are legitimate.

Bluetooth marketers need to work harder both to protect consumers, but also to make us want to accept an advert. Merely letting me know Hard Rock Café is there is not enough, I need some incentive to take a risk and agree to receive the ad.

There should be little doubt that Primark will survive its current child labour scandal. They’ll embark upon a by-the-book ‘open and honest’ crisis PR programme. In short, hands will be held up, apologies will be made, suppliers – ‘we had no idea what they were up to’ – sacked.

And it will work… for now.

But as time goes on, such excuses will wear thin. In sacking suppliers Primark has already broken with a commitment to work with ‘failing factories rather than abandon them’. Cutting and running is no longer the honest route. The human rights implications of outsourcing to developing countries have been known for too long for major retailers to be shocked every time they’re exposed.

Longer term people will begin to wonder just how difficult it is to keep a grip of the supply chain. The answer is that it’s very difficult indeed. But not impossible and one Manchester based firm may be sitting on the answer.

The news that Google is to supply advertising technologies to Yahoo! will rightly raise fears that the Google is following a path formally taken by Microsoft; much loved innovator turned greedy monopolist… yet before we condemn Google – which, like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, does a lot of work for charity – it’s worth asking if online advertising is a natural monopoly.

In retrospect it’s clear that both operating systems and office software were natural monopolies, as interoperability is so important to users. From the mid-to-late 1980s through to the end of the 1990s, information technologies went through an incredible revolution with which many struggled to keep up. People learnt that the only way to be sure everyone would be able to read our documents was if we all used the same software. Microsoft got lucky with windows and Office followed, giving it the muscle to force Internet Explorer on us. Today, people are a little less rigid, but only a little.

Internet advertising is different kind of monopoly. The parallel is closer to that of eBay, which has seen off other auction sites. Just as eBay auctions stuff off, so Google auctions ad space. And the market works most effectively when everyone is using the same platform and so the most bidders and sellers are in the room.

‘David Davis’ resignation isn’t the moment when the mainstream meeja took leave of their senses, but it will be seen in that way… When I heard of his resignation I was rattled… for about 30 seconds. It is a political masterstroke. Politicians have a range of tools at their disposal, but no British MP has ever gone leftfield like this. For innovation, DD scores 10 out of 10.’
– from ‘We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of’ by Dominic Fisher, aka Prague Tory, (deleted shortly after publication)

I’m no fan of David Davis – I’ve always through him a bit of a tit – but his resignation has prompted something of a crisis. And it’s a crisis that threatens to misshape debate in this country in a way that will not only destroy David Davis’s career, but harm many of the civil liberties currently enjoyed by us all.

Some who applauded Davis for his principled stance, are now backpedalling fast. Prague Tory is something of a bellwether for Conservative Party bloggers and began with an excitable piece entitled ‘We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of’; an excerpt from which is above, captured before the author, Dominic Fisher, had a chance to rethink and delete. He’s realised that Davis is toast… as many of us saw at the outset.

David Davis is right on the issue on which he wishes to campaign, but this stunt has gone horribly wrong. There’s nothing wrong with an effective stunt that delivers the right message to the right people, but this was never going to be that.

Some, like Iain Dale, his former chief of staff, cling to denial pretending that Kelvin Mackenzie’s candidacy in a good thing; no doubt Dale will be dumping the chump on return from his honeymoon.

Now may be a time for those who value civil liberties, and fear the easy corruption of the large databases that contain our identities, to hold our noses and work for David Davis. So long as no Labour candidate exists and Tory leader David Cameron continues to insist Davis’s decision was personal, this is not a party political issue.

Nobody would wish to start from this position, but this stunt may yet provide an opportunity for genuine debate… it would be fun to help realise that aim.

Now I blog, I lead a double life as media owner, editor, writer… the whole shebang and the more forward looking PRs send me press releases and even the odd freebie, which is nice and I get to find out how it feels on the other side of the fence.

Over the weekend I got a press release on behalf of Skinny Myths from Darren at Pop Culture PR aimed at my other blog, which I reproduce below. I reckon that if they reached me, their emailing list must be pretty long, but at time of writing nobody appears to have linked to the story. I’ve obviously just changed that and it will be interesting to hear how Darren feels the campaign has gone (I’m sure he’ll pick up on my link).

All this isn’t to judge, but to flag up how difficult it is to get consumer stories into the blogosphere. Skinny Myth’s Celebu-Diet Myth-o-Meter is not a bad idea for a magazine feature or a filler. But I’ve never published a press release on my blog. While print publications are often crying out for material to fill their pages, bloggers don’t feel that pressure. A blog is elastic, stretching or contracting to fit the content. An editor might think ‘great, a nice little celeb story with a message our readers need to hear’ while a blogger thinks ‘so what? That’s not about me’.

Moreover, there is no culture among bloggers of publishing press releases; I’ve never published one.

This issue is most acute for consumer PRs. Political bloggers love to get press releases, it massages their egos by making them think they’re being taken seriously. Consumer PRs are likely to target blogs that are more personal and their press releases are more likely to be viewed as spam. I reckon the only way in, is to give product away… it works on me!

Subject: news item for ya! Darren

Stephen, I sort of see this as a Consumer item more than anything else, Darren.

Celebu-Diet Myth-o-Meter (May 2008)
Source: Diet Watchdog SkinnyMyths.com

Celebu-Diets – plus the myths and lies surrounding them – bounce around the Internet at lightning speed. SkinnyMyths.com, and its Celebu-Diet Myth-o-Meter brainchild, exposes the myths hitting the American digital radar in May – check out http://www.skinnymyths.com/20080606129/News/Latest/Celebu-Diet-Myth-o-Meter-May-2008.html.

While Paris Hilton doesn’t endorse the Red Bull Diet, online buzzsmiths accuse her of lunching only on Red Bull and Water to lose weight. Young women devour the Internet for any celebrity news and become easy prey to these myths – the outcome entirely unhealthy.

The Red Bull Diet tops May’s Myth-o-Meter with Paris Hilton being the celebrity most associated with the diet.

Celebu-Diet Myth-o-Meter May, 2008 (worst-to-best)

1. Red Bull Diet (Paris Hilton)
2. Protein Separation Diet (Maria Carey)
3. Coffee Boost Diet (Olsen Twins)
4. British Facial Analysis Diet (Kate Winslet)
5. Adderall Diet (Britney Spears)
6. White Food Diet (John Cusack)
7. Martha’s Vineyard Detox (Robin Quivers)
8. Boiled Egg Diet (Renee Zellweger)
9. Tea Diet (Rachel Ray)
10. Master Cleanse Diet (Beyonce Knowles)

May 2008 Google Media Share x Wellness Score indexed by average of MS x WS

Is Britney Spears on an Adderall diet? What about John Cusack’s White Food Diet? The Olsen Twins have been accused of drinking loads of coffee to stay slim? SkinnyMyths.com doesn’t verify whether or not the celebrities actually use these tactics to stay razor thin on the red carpet, but celebrity popularized diets may inadvertently be keeping America overweight with mythical nutrition.

About the Celebu-Diet Myth-o-Meter
We thought it would be a fun way to help consumers dismiss many of these celebrity-associated diets. Each month, SkinnyMyths.com tracks online buzz about fad diets using online news data, blogosphere data, and a qualitative score of the diet’s quality from our team of nutritional experts, producing the myth-o-meter index. For example, the Red Bull Diet may force somebody to lose weight, and received buzz in one month, but it receives a 1 because it is very unhealthy to build a well-rounded nutrition program around it. Others like the Boiled Egg Diet receive 8 out of 10 because of its more sensible ingredients.

Rob Barker of Artisan has found himself on NCP Services’ ‘database of agencies we would never use’ after writing on his blog about some embarrassment they suffered

But this kind of thing is far from unusual. After criticising Wickes, the builders’ merchants, I received a letter form Paul Fertleman, apparently a commercial lawyer at parent company Travis Perkins, claiming my piece ‘may be defamatory’. He didn’t bother to go into specifics (as required by the relevant pre-action protocol) and didn’t respond when I asked him to do so, so I reckon that case is closed. (I had used a headline that implied MD Jeremy Bird is not god; perhaps Paul Fertleman thinks he is.)

However, what all this serves to illustrate is that some very senior people are pretty clueless. They will never be capable of leading an organisation that genuinely engages with its publics and has grown up conversations with customers, employees and others with a stake in what they do.

Threatening people with blacklists and the like is so very, very silly, so very immature. I’m embarrassed for them.

David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News flags up the radically different treatment of the rescue of a police officer attacked by a mob when Glasgow Rangers invaded Manchester for some football match.

Glasgow’s Evening Times hails the cop’s rescue by a ‘mystery Rangers fan’ and plays down his injuries, ‘just sore ribs and a puncture wound to his arm.’ While the MEN has a different spin.

All of which illustrates the importance of a local angle, something clients often fail to see. It’s not unusual for an organisation to find itself keen to support a national, or even international, initiative but be unwilling to research local statistics or dig out human interest stories involving people living in the target media’s circulation area. Sometimes there’s a fear that that localism will divert somehow from the national message.

However, while daily regional newspapers will include some national news, local media will almost certainly not. Stories must be directly relevant to their patch; happening to clearly identified people who live (or, at a push, work) in the circulation area or with facts and figures that are specific to the locality.

And then, as this incident illustrates, it’s worth remembering that local papers love a bit of us-against-the-world championing of where their readers live.

Earlier this week arms manufacturer BAE Systems tried to draw a line under its poor reputation by publishing report by Lord Woolf into its current ethical standing. Some Sunday papers had been tipped Woolf would be kind and his lordship was not allowed to search for past misdemeanours… so the result is an exploration of what BAE ‘ought’ to do, complain some.

As a public relations exercise the initiative has failed. BAE’s enemies have used it as an excuse for protest, while the media coverage has focussed on the dirty laundry Woolf wasn’t allowed to wash.

All of which has prompted Matthew Finnegan of Sound Communication, which bravely trades as an ethical agency, to declare that arms manufacture can never be ethical: ‘BAE will only ever be truly ethical when it finds another, more productive purpose, for its hugely skilled workforce.’

Yet this cannot be true – unless to be ethical is to be pacifist – as a people’s right to defend itself means nothing if it must face an aggressor empty handed. It is not the manufacture of arms that is unethical, but irresponsible sale of arms to oppressive regimes and those who launder the guns that somehow find their way onto our streets.