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| Flintlock pistol flashes. Source: Denver Direct |
Its been a hugely successful PR/Marketing campaign and I hear it to have proven ROI too already! I will not get too much into the details of the campaign & what worked and if it can be replicated or not, etc. You can get those from other sites far better suited to the purpose than mine. (some links provided below). I did not get into the discussions initiated by Jacob Morgan either (who initiated me to Sushi when I was in SF in May 2010 & is an up & coming Gen Y dude in the Social CRM arena).
What prompted to post me this commentary on that awesomely brilliant & tough campaign (Imagine 200+ videos within 2 days, can you script it all? Or even act in those many short clips?) is the editorial pick by CustomerThink.com of a post by old colleague Harish Kotadia (and currently an independent consultant) claiming this to be the best ever Social CRM campaign.
I was intrigued & confounded. I believed that this ad campaign was a brilliant stroke of genius & hard work that leveraged the power of social media & networking sites to make a marketing campaign viral. I however did not think of the campaign as a holistic Social CRM campaign. Many people claimed that the brilliance was in the engagement that the campaigners had with the social media users (lets call them social customers here because they are social media users who are potential customers of Old Spice).
I am a huge proponent of businesses listening & engaging on social media (in addition to influencing, measuring, analysing) and this should have stoked me. But it put me into deeper confusions! So I asked on twitter:
"So the ad agency did the listening, corresponding, engaging act on behalf of @oldspice. Did P&G or its LOB engage w/ customers?"
To which good friend & star analyst exemplar Esteban Kolsky responded:
"why does it matter who did it? somebody did. customers got what they wanted / needed. outsourcing is not bad just because"And then added:
"however, that may just be the difference between SCRM and PR/Marketing efforts"
And thats exactly I had wanted to know from the cacophonous cognoscenti (again thanks to Esteban for this term, I think its brilliant!) that interacts on twitter, just to check if I was the lone person with those thoughts.
For me Social CRM is a step ahead (above?) Social Media Marketing (read this post for more) and SCRM entails the involvement the whole organization, not just Marketing/PR. The feedback loop did not encroach much within the organization (check out Esteban's experience continuum).
So when its merely the Marketing/PR that listens & engages on the social media, for me, its just the mouth piece talking. Its not a visceral response. How many other departments within the Old Spice brand/LOB (whatever they call it) of P&G get involved in this? The campaign itself was scripted & executed by an ad agency Wieden & Kennedy.
Another friend, ex analyst, currently head of social channel at huge PR agency, Natalie Petouhoff said that the campaign made big ROI & why would I not consider it Social CRM? To which I responded "high ROI for the company & flash in the pan entertainment for the customers."
Meaning, that there is nothing with a staying power in it for either the organization or the customers. Its something that kick started the brand again for Old Spice and brought it back into the current psyche of the social customer. And thats a great thing to do!
Did this campaign in any way lend to autopoiesis between the externally & internally facing teams of Old Spice &/or P&G?
So, end of long rant & bottom line: IMHO, this is an example of a brilliant social media marketing campaign, just not social CRM.
<span>This was advertising pure and simple. The intent was to reposition their brand and create awareness. Social media was used to create viral resonance and it succeeded - hundreds of distinct YouTube videos, the clever first-time selective twitter response gag, massive word-of-web-mouth (that's what friends are for), and analysts/media going crazy. There is no evidence of a CRM initiative to gather databases and customer understanding and use this. This is a consumer store-shelf semi-impulsive purchase decision - 1:1 CRM does not make a lot of sense. Any advertising campaign in any media can generate lists of potential prospects. With social media you perhaps have the opportunity to reengage them in another campaign (free stuff, next big secret, whatever) but it's all about awareness in my opinion. I also wonder what the intersection is between all their new friends (lots of people who think it's cool) and their actual target buyers for the ads/resonance (women buying bathroom products)?</span>
ReplyDeleteThank you for the insights Lawrence. And welcome to the blog. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd am glad you agree! I was afraid I might be in a fast dwindling minority of people. However, your comment did make me ask you something - CRM traditionally has been about the databases, the transactions & trying to make sense of all the data. But is Social CRM the same too? If it is, are we not wasting a golden opportunity to expand its scope?
Regards,
Prem
Lines can be drawn anywhere. But there has to be some analytical purpose and structural justification to make it meaningful. If we are just looking to be cool by recruiting @OldSpice man as a new superhero of #scrm, then I am skeptical.
ReplyDeleteIf, in classic CRM, we extended a CRM environment out past SFA, through PRM and on to marketing campaign management, and if the managed customer information was integrated to some proactive purpose, then we might be able to discuss how an advertising campaign was part of a CRM initiative. But I think there would have to be some structural integration - just saying theoretically that all advertising is really CRM would not be compelling.
Similarly, it seems to me, for SRCM to cover these social media campaigns there has to be some kind of information integration and some kind of overall customer relationship plan that connects these things together. I don't see this for @OldSpice. It was a cool advert, and then an advertising team, video team, writing team, Mustafa, and bunch of twitter geeks got in a room to try for viral effect. There is a YouTube video showing a little from behind the scenes. Choosing which tweets and twitterers to respond to and which celebrities to target is not CRM in my book, just marketing (love to have heard that discussion).
Now they have ended up with a bunch of friends and followers and one might say there is now an SCRM opportunity with them? But there is no evidence of this yet. I suspect that they will be leveraged as a further resonating audience for the "next cool @OldSpice thing" and NOT as customers.
So yes, I agree it's "just" PR. But this whole debate, for SRCM, is really a distracting storm in a teacup (in a shower, on a beach, ....).
I'll just repeat the comment I left of Jacob's post http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/new-oldspice-campaign-social-media-or-social-crm/
ReplyDeleteI'd say the Old Spice campaign extends social media marketing and adds a interactivity part to it, which is the novelty here. The series have nothing to do with gaining a deeper understanding of the customer needs and expectations and was not designed to build long-lasting engagement - and it was never intended to be so.
Following the success in the number of eyeballs being exposed, they will not have any actionable insights on how to 'tweak' Old Spice to meet the expectations of today's consumers - only an idea of what type of advertising works now until the next viral vid comes along. Remember the fad of 'yestermonth', the Flashmob? Next!
The use of the word 'campaign' actually says pretty much everything here.
Cheers,
Mark
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ReplyDelete<p>Prem, great post, and I completely agree with you. This has nothing to do with social crm. Nothing. Just because the guy read off some questions from Twitter and answered them in a video format does not make it interactive necessarily. Interactive means that something interacts with you. This campaign interacted with few people, and mostly famous ones. Which is completely fine. Not humanly possible to respond to all - 200 videos in 2 days is already sort of superhuman. So it makes me think of more an influencer campaign than anything (with a few laypeople thrown in for fun) -- if you can delight the influencer with a personalized video, he will tell his network. Plain and simple.
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</p><p>Another reason why it's not scrm: The purpose wasn't to interact and figure out what people like and dislike about Old Spice, and serve them a better product. The purpose was not to listen and respond, analyze, get the organization to work together to respond. The purpose was to create something fun and relevant, to spread the message virally.
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ReplyDelete<p>Prem, great post, and I completely agree with you. This has nothing to do with social crm. Nothing. Just because the guy read off some questions from Twitter and answered them in a video format does not make it interactive necessarily. Interactive means that something interacts with you. This campaign interacted with few people, and mostly famous ones. Which is completely fine. Not humanly possible to respond to all - 200 videos in 2 days is already sort of superhuman. So it makes me think of more an influencer campaign than anything (with a few laypeople thrown in for fun) -- if you can delight the influencer with a personalized video, he will tell his network. Plain and simple.
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</p><p>Another reason why it's not scrm: The purpose wasn't to interact and figure out what people like and dislike about Old Spice, and serve them a better product. The purpose was not to listen and respond, analyze, get the organization to work together to respond. The purpose was to create something fun and relevant, to spread the message virally.
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Tx for joining the conversation @themaria. :) Lets not go anywhere near the question was it interactive. ;) People will get stuck up on semantics all over again! (As if we didn't do that with Social CRM as a term itself.)
ReplyDeleteBut I do agree with you on the Intent aspect thoroughly. However, as Nat reminds us of two aspects - 1) we do not know of P&G actual intent 2) may be this wild success does spark a shift with P&G (well, Old Spice brand) and makes them talk to consumers even for whats primarily an impulse buying product. May be they can do a Tide online, instead of having to 'live' with their customers in their homes? (Imagine having to live with cocky teens & young adult men! ;) )
Regards,
Prem
Thanks for the thought provoking post, Prem..
ReplyDeleteThis comment is specific to the article that was written about the India market and Old Spice
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/how-the-blade-killed-the-aftershave
How does this campaign bring back any people who have moved on from the brand and category?
Does this campaign reflect that they may be rebadging another product with the name Old Spice?
Thank you for that link Syamant! Thats a very nicely written one & very packed with interesting anecdotal trivia too! :)
ReplyDeleteYes, P&G seems to be revamping the image of Old Spice and thats all the brouhaha about the recent social media marketing blitzkreig.
I do not know if they are rebadging something else or just came up with an all new formula & badging it as Old Spice. Somebody at Old spice must have to answer that one. But the campaign sure takes them farther away the chacha mama kind of pictures. :D
Thanks for the post Prem - and seeding some great discussions! Since I've spent time in an agency, (lots of time) around CRM, and the last five years as a CMO, I thought I'd weigh in and actually attempt to agree with you, and Maria (and Lawrence) AND Dr Nat as well. First this was a campaign plain and simple. A super well-executed, multi-channel social campaign. These types of campaigns may be necessary for effective SCRM, but they are not sufficient to make it SCRM (Maria makes similar point I believe in commenting on Wim's post).
ReplyDeleteThat said, unless we know what's going on within P&G and what they have planned as a sequel, I don't think we can automatically say that this is not PART of an overall SCRM effort for the Old Spice brand. In fact this may be one heck of an opening act, and I'll even argue that the buzz/goodwill created by this campaign will make it a lot easier to engage in the future, create focus groups, test other messages etc.
In a way, P&G has done a great job with Outreach, starting a Conversation, and engaging a select group of influencers in a fun, participatory 'Experience' - while creating buzz. And they ended the campaign at the peak of the buzz. Brilliant. These are all initial stages (next stages are 'Offers' and 'WOM deals') of a social marketing maturity model I've been working on and will be blogging on at the end of the week at http://blog.offerpop.com.
If P&G follows this roadmap, I wouldn't be surprised if they follow up this first campaign with exclusive offers for fans/followers, additional WOM programs and other deals. THEN if they start to wire this up with POS systems, and other transactional data and processes, we might have an actual social CRM program unfolding in front of our eyes. It still could happen!
Allen
Allen,
ReplyDeleteThanks a LOT for that clarity! Yes, I completely stand corrected by you, Nat, et al. This campaign might be the beggining of a SCRM program and we cannot write it off quite yet. Claiming this single campaign as a fullfelged SCRM program is what prompted me to add to the noise that the campaign has now become. :)
Looking forward to the post Allen. Always eager to learn! And am glad that I could lure me into my blog. :D Keep sharing your insights with us. :)
Regards,
Prem
My pleasure - I have been swamped over the last few months getting Offerpop off the ground, but hope to be a more frequent visitor/commenter here, and even plan to contribute a new guest post or two to Mr Kolsky's blog as well!
ReplyDeletebest,
Allen
<p>im curious to know the Why of this campaign. perhaps it will be discussed at some stage.
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