Enjoy this best-selling updated 8^th edition – packed with new material, keeping abreast with AI, AR, VR, MR, MA and other innovative approaches to marketing communications. All integrated with the world’s most popular SOSTAC® Planning methodology that delivers a reassuring sense of order in a chaotic digital world and also that delivers success from better, MarComms’ ‘information-based’ decisions.

In Part 2 – all ten marcomms tactical tools (incl ads, PR, sponsorship, Owned, Earned and Paid Media etc.)  has a sample SOSTAC® Plan at the end of chapter.

Ze Zook and I are so pleased with it.  So much new material including AI integrating with MarComms.  We’ve tried to keep the edutainment angle so readers actually enjoy discovering some cutting-edge examples, tips and tools throughout the book. Thanks to the team at @Kogan Page including: Alison, Donna, Bruna and  Jack, Jeylan, Susie and of course, Helen Kogan.

What New Marketing and What Classic Marketing is in the 8th ed.?

What’s new and what’s old in Marketing Communications 8th ed.?

20% author’s discount can be used legitimately by following these instructions.

1. Go to koganpage.com/MC8
2. Click ‘Add to Cart’
3. Click ‘Checkout’ on the top right corner of the screen.
4. Complete your Billing & Delivery Information
5. Click ‘Continue to Review & Pay’
6. Scroll down to ‘Review Items’
7. In this section, click the ‘Add an offer code’ button – bottom right
8. Enter your code AMK20 in the box provided
9. Scroll down to input your payment information
10. Click the ‘Buy Now’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Enjoy Your Book

The post Marketing Communications 8th ed Released! appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

They say that ‘Tech is neutral’. So, like marketing, you can use it for good or for evil. You have good actors and bad actors.  Here are some potential advantages and disadvantages of deepfake.

Advantages of Deep Fake

1. Enables global advertisements to be tailored and ‘dubbed perfectly’ to local languages and local brand names (see Just Eat and Snoop Dog).
2. Improve internal comms by enabling CEOs to speak to their staff around the world in perfect local language.
3. Act in a movie after you are deceased
4. Direct a movie using a younger version of you or a younger version of another actor.

Disadvantages & Dangers of Deep Fake

1. Catastrophic damage to public trust and to markets could come from deep fake attacks.
2. Cynical audiences will neither trust nor believe in any news or evidence on camera or video.
3. Non-cynical, ignorant audiences will gladly believe deep fake videos that reinforce their opinions and values.
4. International opponents will use synthetic media to sow the seeds of distrust plus reinforce anti-democratic values.
5. Terrorized women have had their faces faked and inserted into pornographic images and films.
6. Deep fake attacks – on markets and trust in markets
7. If everything can be deep-faked. Then everything can be denied. Worse still, untrue accusations can have ‘proof’ (deep-fake proof).
8. Hijack your bio-metrics
9. Boost fraud – intimidate/blackmail celebrities with fake porn or any obscene imagery
10. Destabilise trust

Do the Disadvantages Outweigh the Advantages?

What do you think? Can deep fake be used for good only? Have a look at  another chilling application of data, untruths and destruction of society in The Dark Arts of Marketing.

‘Just Eat’ Deep Faked their Australian Ad

Just Eat (Snoop Dog) ad was changed to its Australian subsidiary brand name – Menulog. They seamlessly switched out the word ‘Just Eat’ for ‘Menulog’ so that Snoop Dog appears to say ‘Menulog’.

Are Governments Ready For Deep Fake Attacks?

No they are not. US Military, Law Enforcement and intelligence agencies have been monitoring Deep Fakes for years. During a 2019 hearing Senator Ben Sasse asked ‘if the USA is ready for the onslaught of disinformation, fakery and fraud?’  He continued: ‘Are we organised in a way that we could possibly respond fast enough?’ The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in the USA, Dan Coates acknowledges that it poses a major threat to the United States and ‘it is something the intelligence community needs to be restructured to address.’

How do they create deep fakes?

They filmed a Tom Cruise impersonator who also looked very like him. They only deep-faked Cruise’s face. They digitally stitched Tom Cruise’s face onto the face of the impersonator on video. They start with a library of images of Tom Cruise – every possible angle and include all the expressions and all the emotions of Tom Cruise. They then train the machine with this data set.

Training means it’s going to analyse all the images of Tom Cruise. All his expressions. They then compare these to the impersonator. The computer then teaches itself – so that when the impersonator is smiling, they recreate Tom Cruise smiling.  They use AI & Deep Learning to create fake content or ‘deep fakes’.

GANs General Adversorial Networks
It is like setting up a game with two AIs competing to produce the best fake synthetic content – as these two new combat each other – one tries to generate the best image – the other tries to identify or detect where it could be improved  – continually improving until you cannot tell the difference!

What have these got in common

(apart from being all white)?

Answer – they are not human. They do not exist. A computer created them. They all come from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com . Creating characters, avatars, bots and robots is already happening. Some bots are created others are partly regenerated (or reincarnated) from the deceased as demonstrated in Project December as well as Microsoft’s patent for digitally reincarnating dead people as chat bots (if the families give permission) as highlighted in the  Chinese Girlbot with 465m boyfriends.

Deep fake acceleration

Cadence, tenor and syncopation are now being incorporated into fakes. You just type the words into a computer and the words appear to come out of someone else’s mouth! Estimates suggest that within 5-7 years, the average youtuber and tik-tok-er – will be able to do what elite top hollwood studios and advanced AI companies can do now.

Synthesia Avatars a UK company appears to be able to do this as they replace cameras with code.  And there are many others…coming.

What must you do…..?

1. Watch this excellent,  albeit frightening, Bill Whitaker report from the 60 Minutes series (the video is only  13 minutes).
2. Understand what a deep fake is and what is synthetic media?
3. Discuss, how do we inoculate ourselves & understand that this content is coming and exists – without being cynical – without losing trust in authentic media?
4. Explore/discuss how do we authenticate stories, photos, videos, media, journalists, bloggers, tweeters ….?
5. Read: Nina Schick Deep Fakes – the coming infocalypse.
6. Understand how AI can create dialogues and even relationships between humans and avatars – read Chinese Girlbot with 465m boyfriends.

Bill Whitaker reports. “60 Minutes” is the most successful television broadcast in history. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast began in 1968 and is still a hit, over 50 seasons later, regularly making Nielsen’s Top 10.

Subscribe to the “60 Minutes” YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/1S7CLRu

Please do post a comment and I will reply to you.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy:

AI and Data – Crisis Coming?

Facebook Data: How it was used by Cambridge Analytica

The Dark Arts of Marketing

Chinese Girlbot with 465m boyfriends

Will ChatGPT + ChatBots + Avatars Make Us Immortal?

If you would like me to send you any of my future posts by email – please enter your email address in the ‘Subcribe and Get Cutting-Edge Alerts’ section (top right corner).

Join my free 30 minute Friday chat about AI, Innovation and Ethics in Marketing and Business.
1pm (Dublin/London time)  on my Linkedin Profile (scroll down to Activity and then select ‘Events’) .

I also issue a 60 Second Summary of all previous chats here.

The post Deep Fakes / Synthetic Media in Marketing – Advans & Disadvans appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Chatbots can create competitive advantage. Ignore them at your peril. Here, we apply a #SOSTAC ®  Plan for developing your own chatbot.  Written by PR Smith and Tom Sickert.

Image by Parker_West from Pixabay

SOSTAC ® Planning Framework www.sostac.org

SITUATION ANALYSIS

Hyper-competition is here to stay and chatbots have a role to play. Data, AI, and chatbots in particular can create a new competitive advantage. Ignore these at your peril.

AI-driven chatbots can boost the CX (customer experience), strengthen existing customer relationships, reach new prospects, screen enquiries, identify best prospects, give them personalised answers/services instantaneously, convert to sales and thereafter be used to nurture stronger (potentially , lifetime, relationships).  Ignore chatbots at your peril.

Typical customer service staff feedback reveals: “We have all this excellent information on our public website – product description, prices, delivery times & costs, return policies… but still we get countless calls and emails about these.” It appears that many people are just not willing to work their way through websites, searching, scrolling and hoping to find a solution.

Should you have a Bot?

All customers have a ‘job to be done’ (Christensen et al 2016) when they visit a website (or an app). They want to find product information, check a price, read reviews, buy a product, be entertained, informed etc. Customers just want, access to the information or experience as quickly as possible (with or without a bot).

Chatbots or Humans – survey: what do people want?

Would anyone prefer to queue in a bank to withdraw money from a human or queue for an faceless automated cash withdrawal machine in the wall?

Bots present an opportunity to improve the relationship with both existing and potential new customers. This strengthens, what are arguably, your two greatest assets today: your brand, and your customer data in a new AI-supported world of chatbots. Let us apply this to a fictitious washing machine company.

OBJECTIVES

Be clear about why you want a chatbot? ‘Because everyone else has one’ is not a good enough answer. ‘Reduce costs’ is a popular answer but misses the real opportunity. The ultimate answer is to help customers to have a better CX (customer experience) and also identify your best potential lifetime customers. An AI-driven chatbot can instantaneously answer product questions, share advice, book appointments (for salespeople or technicians), take orders, trigger a follow-up onboarding series of messages in a personalised way 24/7/365.

All of these can, and should, be quantified objectives – in fact, SMART Objectives e.g. Boost CX Satisfaction Scores from 50% to 70 to 90% in years 1, 2 & 3 (or in Q1, Q2 and Q3?); Boost Net Promoter Scores (likelihood to recommend your service to a friend from 10 to 30 to 50); Reduce time taken for the visitor to purchase (reducing these times makes customers happy).

Cost-saving operational objectives are popular e.g. To reduce the number of calls/emails handled by 25% in the first 12 months.

More specific MVP (Minimum Viable Product) objectives can also be set. e.g.  the chatbot must help customers to:

• Find serial numbers and product names for all units produced by the company;
• Solving the top ten common problems – using images, links or text based on customer input;
• Create a service ticket for ALL ENQUIRIES (which includes capturing the customer phone number) so the helpdesk can call and resolve the customer’s issue via phone.

Be very clear about why you want an AI-Driven ChatBot. Think about how chatbots might help your business even more in, say, 3 years from now?    

Is ignoring chatbot potential to save money (and boost CX) like either  burying your head in the ground

Burying your head in the ground doesn’t solve any problems nor exploit any opportunities

or like throwing money down the toilet as you pay for slower, less personalised, human customer service?

Wasting Money

STRATEGY

Stage 1: Build a pilot AI ChatBot for Brand X washing machine website  –  aimed at helping customers find what washing machine is best for them, in a personalised, friendly and reassuring way. The chatbot dialogue must be knowledgeable yet friendly (to match the brand personality). Helping the customer in an informal way, yet demonstrating common sense knowledge (without jargon).

The chatbot must at all times support the values and the purpose of the overall business.   Environmentalism is an important issue for our customers, so and useful green guidance and tips should be offered where relevant and whenever the customer expresses interest (or wherever interest is detected e.g. if a visitor watches any of our green content e.g. ‘3 Tops Tips to Save Energy‘ video).

Data collection is critical to the long-term success of the AI-Supported chatbot and the business overall. Customer preferences, interests, demographics and other data feed into each customer profile, which in turn helps to find correlations to further improve both specially tailored offers and new products in the future.

Stage 2: Roll out to all other white good product range (e.g. washing machines,  dishwashers and microwaves) within 18 months and increasing NPS scores from 30 to 50 (as listed in the objectives).

Strategy

TACTICS

There are several tactical choices available when developing a chatbot .

1. Out-Of-The-Box Solutions, provided by vendors that have predefined models and features and functionalities, that can be customized based on your requirements. These solutions as well are powered (depending on your budget) by high performance AI solutions and features and functionalities. The provider of the chatbot solution can help you to assess your needs and find the optimal solution. There are now many chatbot companies including: Ada, AWS, Botsify, Chatfuel, Hubspot, Liveperson, Mobile Monkey, Microsoft’s Bot Framework and Cognitive Services

2. In-house Solution Created by ‘Citizen Developers’. These require NO code or LOW code experience and can be created by anybody who is able to create email rules in Microsoft Outlook. Yes, it is (mostly) that simple – these drag & drop (communication flow) solutions are offered by Microsoft and AMAZON alike. It gives you not too many options to customize and apply specific functionalities, but it sure is enough to for professional use. NB Citizen Development – no technical and programming skills needed.

3. Developed From Scratch – by coders and other IT professionals, in collaboration with your subject matter experts. These chatbots are powered either by custom AI with sophisticated algorithms and enhanced features and functionalities.

Sometimes out-of-the-box AI models are used as the basic framework e.g. Amazon’s LEX and Microsoft’s  Bot Framework and Cognitive Services solutions (object and image recognition, speech and sound recognition and reasoning). These can be tweaked later (either the interface or the code itself).

ACTIONS

In the end, the chatbot is just a little icon on your website.  However, there is still much work to be done. Miss these detailed ‘Actions’ and the AI Chatbot project will fail. Depending on which option you take will determine the details of the actions required.  Remember a chat project is never really finished. It can and should be continually improving via small tweaks and/or more data helping the chatbot to become more user helpful. So now the detailed work (actions) – we create the topics/answer, the question and 5-10 iterations of each question that can trigger the relevant answer.

Conversation Flows (marketing language)  / Decision Trees   

This In-house solution was created by ‘Citizen Developers’ (Tactical Option no.2).

Decision trees- conversation flows – from Microsoft Virtual Agents

You do not need any programme/development skills.   Conditions = scenarios – in this case, a condition can be whether you have a front loader washing machine or a top loader washing machine (see below).

Sample questions:

• When is the special sales weekend for your washing machines?
• When does my warranty expire?
• My washing machine is leaking, what should I do
• My washing turned pink, what can I do?
• I washed all my knives and forks in my washing machine by mistake – what should I do?

A script to help chatbot converse with a human customer/visitor

Optimised Resource Planning (also called RSO Resource Scheduling Optimization) is where AI can help customers to book the most appropriate technician (based on the particular problem description plus the items the customer has already checked) plus the customer’s and technician’s time and availability. The booking data is obviously also made accessible for the engineer.

Meanwhile, last but not least, is deployment. You have the chatbot developed and ready to go but how do you deploy it can determine its ultimate success or failure.  The key missing piece in the actions section of many plans is ‘internal marketing’ which comprise: communication, motivation and training.

Make sure people know about the chatbot development early on. Bring them with you. Communicate to them and motivate them about how this will help the business to survive in a hyper-competitive world. Remove fears of redundancy because of chatbots. Get people behind the idea. Perhaps consider redeploying staff into new jobs if the chatbot proves to be very successful – many of which will require training. Managing the chatbots may well require training and certainly going forward maintenance, coding, data analytics and reporting are just some of the jobs required.

NB It is critical that one person takes ownership of the chatbot from the very start, which leads us nicely into the final stage of SOSTAC(r) PLanning – Control – ‘how do we know we are getting there?’.

CONTROL

How do you measure success? Measure the KPIs you wrote in the Objectives section. NPS scores etc.

During the chatbot development stages, measure the MVP you have set . Then when you start testing/training the chatbot – watch closely, make fast changes and repeat.

Stay very close.  Watch your KPI Objectives. After that, you can start comparing last month’s KPIs to next month’s projections.  Don’t overcomplicate things.

Check the data you are collecting. Can it be used to give you insights on customer needs, what they like/don’t like?  What they need more help with? What helps you to identify your ideal customers? You will get a lot of data and insights that will allow you to dig deeper and drive     continual improvements.

Agree Your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) –  your version 1.0   and check to see if its working

e.g. “Tom and Paul agree that their MVP V1 must have following features & functionalities before deployment:

1. Include all washing machine types of their company with pictures and serial numbers so customers can easily identify their product
2. Know the top 10 problems customers can fix themselves and so that the chatbot can provide solutions via images, links or text based on customer input
3. Must have the function to immediately create a service ticket for the helpdesk to directly call the customer via phone
4. Must be able to converse in English and German for the aforementioned 3 features since UK and Germany are they key markets and pilot regions

Stay calm. Chatbots are complex.

In the end, it’s like driving a car – you are probably not an engineer – you simply use the technology. If things need to be fixed or improved – you go to the people whose job it is to do just that.

Supervising Your Chatbot’s Learning

An AI powered chatbot needs to be supervised to ensure that it LEARNS properly. In other words – you must TEACH it, give it supporting guidance and directions. That is achieved with defining “confidence scores” for each intent and related answers or information sources. Example:

• Customer asks: “How is the weather outside?”
  • The bot’s NLU and NLP identify “weather” and “outside” – giving a 99% confidence score that you are asking about the weather.
• Customer asks: “Is it sunny or rainy?”
  • The bot, in the beginning, will not be able to associate “sunny” and “rainy” with a question about the weather. So, it will give a very low confidence score. It might even respond with a wrong answer.

Managing Confidence Scores

Here is where managing confidence scores allow you to manage the responses. You screen the questions asked – filter, based on the automated confidence score the bot gave and begin to fine-tune and manually train your bot. That will take more time in the beginning – but with increased usage – it will take less time and provide better results.

Based on NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and NLP (Processing), the user’s intent is determined and, based on a confidence score – the answer selected is the one that is most feasible. Defining confidence levels is a balancing act   between say “I don’t know” vs giving the wrong answer.

This depends on how important a topic is from the customer’s perspective. And that goes already quite far into AI, machine learning and a bit into deep learning.  You ask:

• “What is the temperature tomorrow in Dublin” an 80% confidence score for the AI thinking you mean “what is the weather tomorrow in Dublin” is OK.
• “How long are the shops open today” a 99% confidence score for the AI would be needed to know that you mean “How long is the mall around the corner open today”?

Here are some examples for confidence scores and features you can apply:

If a question is asked and the bot does not fully understand (e.g. confidence score between 60% and 80%) – the bot could clarify it by suggesting topics e.g. “Did you ask about <topic x>”).

If the initial question has a confidence score between 75-90%, but the question has a typo – the chatbot will specifically reply: “You typed Dutsche Bnudselagi – did you mean Deutsche Bundesliga or Deutsche Bundesbank or Deutsche Bundespost?”.  Each option then could be directly selectable.

If the confidence score is below 50% (or any threshold you define), you can have the bot offering to connect directly to a person for a live-chat or simply respond “I am sorry, I do not understand what you ask. I know about <topic 1>, <topic 2>,…<topic x>. A properly phrased question could be this: “What is the cost for a top loader washing machine with energy level B?>”

Confidence scores should be reviewed and evaluated topic by topic and adjusted as needed to avoid giving out false information.

The Route to Success
is to define and create proper topics and help the AI to identify the intent based on keywords. If a question causes a confidence score lower than 50% the bot will basically say “I don’t understand” and send a message to the human team to check (and categorise) the question. Based on our review we then can create a completely new topic, adjust the confidence score to relate to an applicable answer, or connect with our developers in case there was actually a technical issue preventing the bot from answering.

Feed the AI with Questions and Answers
If we had 10 basic questions. And say, possibly 5 variations of each question. This is a very crude example of data set. This could be presented as a 3 column table or an excel sheet (see below).

Creat Variations (or ‘iterations’) of a basic question

Doing this manually is a citizen development approach but other approaches will often have some manual approaches too.

We attach an answer for each FAQ.   Each question and its variety of similar questions (‘iterations’ which basically ask the same question) will have an answer Linkedin to it. You can write all imaginable iterations of a question and then link it to the same answer.

Say you have 5 versions (iterations) of a question the chatbot identifies the INTENT (from the use of the keywords in the question) and then provides the answer.

Answers as well can be in various types and formats e.g. pictures and/or videos or text attached to an answer? E.g. take the live weather feed from youtube.

RESOURCES (the 4Ms)

What Resources Do You Need (The 4 Ms)?

Men and Women (human resource) + money (budgets)  + minutes (timescales) +megadata (data – structured and unstructured). ‘Resources Required’ depend on the company’s maturity and readiness in various areas.

MEN AND WOMEN  A different company that created an internal chatbot had the following resources: a strategic leader, 3 subject matter experts from the team, 4 external developers and 4 Microsoft specialists who’s support was included in the contract with Microsoft. They needed 9 months from version 0.0 to deploy version 1.0.

MONEY  (budget) A project manager can allocate a number of hours each week to the project. This can be fully costed. Then there are also license costs which vary enormously e.g. from $400 pm to $4,000 pm for, say, 10,000 requests p.m. Alternatively, a Flat Fee can be fixed at whether you have 1 enquiry or 1m enquiries.  Ask the question: ‘If I get x000,000 viewers/enquiries how much will it cost?’

Hosting – you need to check if the above costs include the cost to host the application (the bot itself) on (a) CSP (Cloud Service Provider) like Microsoft, Google, IBM, AWS plus give the bot access to your data or (b) on-premises (data centre). You can easily spend hundreds of thousands on a solution that makes AMAZON jealous with dozens of developers and features and functionalities and with connections to data sources. Here is where a Solution Architect, Solution Designer or a representative from a vendor can help to calculate and estimate costs and feasibility.

MEGA-DATA Data includes all data – both structured and unstructured. This effectively includes all data and information that can be used – whether (a) a database of customers (and their preferences plus their previous purchases) for personalising answers,  (b) Q&A lists (for recognising questions and ‘intent’ as well as the sending the right answers (c) data readiness.

Establishing information & data readiness for chatbot is a critical step in any AI (or even CRM project).   Is your data ready to be used (is it clean and consistent in, say, the use of first name, second name with first letter in capitals, plus does every customer list the type of washing machine they bought?) etc. If the data is not OK – you may need dozens of people cleaning it up. This can take weeks or even months. However – if everything is OK, you may need no more than a handful of people in total.

Data Readiness is more complex than capital letters for names. It means that data is ready to be used at different levels and angles:

1. Accuracy – is any data we provide correct, consistent, cohesive, always up-to-date and owned by us?
2. Security – can data access be misused to breach our network? Accessibility – chatbot is given access to read, write, modify and create content (access includes diaries)
3. Compliance – are we only displaying data that is needed?
4. Technical – is accessing the data actually possible?

MegaData – ensure all the data and information is ready for the chatbot to communicate to users. This includes Conversation Flows/Decision Trees.

Security  –  protect your business from ‘malicious intents’ (a) hackers accessing your data (b) attacks from say an aggressive competitor 10,000 enquiries per second which creates –   DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) = system overload = systems crash.  There are 7 layers of security including network security, application security and data security.

MINUTES  / TIMESCALES   how long does it take to get a chatbot up and running?  Again depending on the solution you want to see after completion. And how fast you want things done. So using a basic project framework setup triangle might bring everybody in alignment (resource & scope & cost à Quality). In uncertain/ambiguous situations like these – going agile for execution is the best option.  Set an exact number of hours p.w. on this project.  Assign people and say “GO! See what you can do with the money we have in 12 months”.

Incidentally, Speed of Bot-Response should be agreed: 3-5 seconds or instantaneous + volume of enquiries/interactions from visitors (5 an hour or 500,000 a day) affects costs & solution design and architecture.

—end—

Many thanks to Tom Sickert. This is an early draft and so we welcome your comments, queries, challenges or improved examples. Please do post a comment.

If you liked this you might also enjoy:

Chinese GirlBot With 465m Boyfriends

Artificial Influencers – Meet Shudu & Miquela

Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula (IRD)

Here Come The Really Clever Bots – where AI meets customer needs

Join me in Clubhouse in my club called SOSTAC® Plans any Friday 3.30pm – 4.00pm BST for a chat, Q&A, observations about SOSTAC(r) Plans and any other marketing related issues including AI Driven Bots.

The post Develop your own Chat-Bot – SOSTAC® Project Plan appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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External Exhibition Transforms 500 Unused Poster Sites

The #Covid Crisis has created empty poster sites all around the streets  of Dublin. This creates a baron, empty, dirty, negative, pessimistic feeling in the community. Lowering everyone’s mood during this time of  Covid 19 crisis in cities, towns and villages around the world.

Question: How to convert this negative feeling into a positive feeling? Think outside the box. Many disruptive business models are enjoying large scale success. e.g. Alibaba, the world’s most valuable retailer, owns no inventory. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content (though it does take ownership!). Amazon are looking at ship and shop’ (anticipate your needs – ship/deliver goods and then ask you to confirm the order) rather than the tradigital ‘shop and ship’ model. So how can a photo gallery think outside the box?

Answer: The Positive Space Project, a city-wide crowd-funded exhibition that turns 500 unused poster sites across Dublin into a gallery for Irish photographers to be enjoyed by Dubliners. Rather than bring people to the gallery, bring the gallery to the people.

Thinking Outside The Box

So if people cannot go to galleries, bring the galleries to the people.  Corina Gaffey started the GoFundMe campaign called The Positive Space. Basically they have raised money €7,500 (target €10,000) www.gofundme.com/f/the-positive-space  . This money pays for the production and installation of the posters.

A Visual Feast For the Eyes

Is how Naoimi Gaffey, photographer, describes it. So sit back and enjoy from a distance, the great work by the photographers, the Gaffeys, the poster postermen.  Art helps a city to thrive.

Shutters Also Improve Aesthetics and Promote #Brands

Metal shutters can be put to use: making the environment more pleasant, promoting the business  and securing the business at night.

Wall & Keogh, Richmond Street South, Dublin. My own mother, Úna Ni Glasáin, had a chemist shop,  at 13 College Green, Dublin 2. It was called Gleeson’s Chemist. It’s now a lovely little coffee shop called Keoghs  (see red canopy below).  I remember my Mum was deeply saddened when she had to put metal shutters up in the 1980s.

Keoghs, 13 College Green, Dublin (formerly Gleesons Chemist)

No one seemed to be thinking outside the boxes and generating beautiful eye-catching, city-enhancing, metal shutters back in the 1980s.  But today there is much more art on the street – helping local people, helping artists, helping  tourists, helping brands and helping businesses. And when we layer on #digital and #interactive signage, we will hopefully see even more interesting interactive aesthetically pleasing, yet secure, shop-fronts that help customers to preview, preselect or even order goods/services from a shop front.  Have you seen anything interesting – perhaps Scots Road in #Singapore  or anywhere else? Please send me in your photo and we’ll add it to this post.

We will look at Great Covid Idea: Silver Shutters as a separate post later.

Walls Also Improve Aesthetics and Promote #Brands

Dublin Print Company, 19-20 Redmonds Hill, Dublin 2

It is just great to see ‘owned media’  being used aesthetically. This is a small print company called Dublin Print Company. This is supported by the Grey Area Project in Dublin .

Today, however, retailers have options to be more creative. Let’s hopefully see a few more of these.  In fact #DublinWalls DublinWalls.com  promotes murals on walls.

DublinWalls.com is a photo collection of Dublin Walls created by talented artists. These murals embellish the capital city of Ireland. The next post,  will explore how walls (owned media) are used by some marketers).

We will look at lots of interesting walls in Dublin plus a few from Belfast (The Guinness mural is so good I had to include it!). Please send me in your photos of anything that brightens up a street, an alley-way , a wall, a window or even a  just a door.   As marketers, we  can brighten up our streets and support our brands and /or help spread important messages  simultaneously.  I will publish another blog post with lots of creative ideas from Dublin, Belfast, Dundalk, London and elsewhere.

See a lot more stunning images (and stories) in Great Covid Idea 2: Walls Of Gold .  If you enter your email address  in the ‘Subscribe to Marketing Insights’ form, I will send you an alert re any new posts.

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Leveraging your owned media (walls, windows, doors) is a tactic (free advertising but you must check the details of your lease first and any local council restrictions). This tactical tool is part of the details of  Strategy which is part of my  SOSTAC^® Planning framework. Those wanting to become SOSTAC^® Certified Planners can visit  SOSTAC.org 

 

PR Smith’s SOSTAC^® Planning framework circular diagram showing each of the 6 sections.

The Projects

Luciana Marin

Luli took a lot of photographs of street art in Dublin.  Luli stumbled across a Banksy mural one morning, in the middle of temple bar, close to the Mezz . Luli kindly gave us permission to use her instagram photos  @lulimarin86   Follow #streetartaroundtheworldbylulimarin  & #dublinwallscollection    www.lucianamarin.com contains an intriguing collection of street art entitle #StreetArtChaser

Congrats and thanks to Corina Gaffey for setting up #ThePositiveSpace Exhibition and for inspiring this post.

The post Disruptive Dublin Gallery Model – Think Outside Box appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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At last, here are the checklists – what you got to do to ensure you are GDPR compliant. Part 3 now explores GDPR Tactics (the details of Strategy Part 2) and the Actions (including checklists you can use) and finally, Control – what you need to check to ensure your data is safe and fully under control.  Part 1 introduced GDPR Situation which is a shock for many businesses, as it could put some out of business!

TACTICS (the details of strategy)

To START MANAGING DATA MUCH MORE SERIOUSLY employ these Tactics

Appoint a Data Officer

Medium to large businesses will need a data protection officer.

Audit High-Risk Aspects Of The Business

Businesses must identify very high risks and how they would mitigate it. If your data is encrypted, then it is not ‘high risk’.

Commence Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs)

issued in 2017 as part of the implementation package for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Run An Attack Simulation

with senior management to ensure that all of your data processes are robust in the case of an attack or a personal data breach and are GDPR complaint.

Run an attack simulation

Document Your Risk Management

Organisations and accountable individuals must document their approach to managing risk inherent with collecting & keeping personal data that your firm, your partners and your suppliers process.

To BUILD A DATA PROTECTION CULTURE – employ these Tactics:

Train Staff 

Ensure all your staff (from Board Level down) have regular data protection awareness training (see  ‘internal marketing’ in the Action section). Training is the first line of defence. Did you train your staff and your board? Board members need to be aware of the business risks of cyber security and understand the legal significance of an accountable individual at Board level.

Laurette Batstone SOSTAC® Certified Planner

Encrypt Data

Data encryption translates data into another form, or code. Only people with access to a password or secret key (formally called a decryption key) can actually read it. Encrypted data is commonly referred to as ciphertext, while unencrypted data is called plaintext.

Improve Response Times When Reporting Hacks 

Under GDPR you have 72 hours to report a breach of security to the ICO (compared to the old 138 day response time) .  GDPR will become part of the value chain.  Businesses will have to integrate GDPR into almost everything as everything becomes connected via the IoT (Internet of things).   

Improve Response Times When Reporting a Hack

Improve Response Times SARs

Subject Access Request ( a request from a customer to see what data is being kept about them) is free of charge and organisations must complete this within one month, except in exceptional circumstances, where multiple requests are made, a ‘reasonable’ administration fee can be charged.

Regularly Scrutinise Your Cloud And Server Suppliers

You have a responsibility to check up on your suppliers and any partners that they too are compliant with GDPR.

Induction & Data Protection

Include data protection into induction processes.

Digital Data is a new asset which needs to be managed carefully

ACTIONS (how to ensure excellent execution of the new GDPR)

Internal Marketing

Internal Marketing means Motivating, Communicating and Training your team to ensure they execute GDPR with excellence and with passion.

This can come down to specifying detailed actions (checklists of things individuals have to do).

Once all stuff fully understand why GDPR is important (find out how to motivate them), then communicate with them about the importance and ultimately train them to point where you even issue fool-proof checklists for procedures or processes. Remember, training is mandatory. So, schedule a series of motivation & communication & training events across the organisation. In marketing parlance, we call all of this Internal marketing (motivating staff, communicating with staff and training staff). It’s often forgotten (& requires a budget) & is often the hidden reason why so many plans fail.

Motivate, Communicate & Train your staff

Motivation:

Ensure staff and board members understand how important GDPR is. Ensure they understand the ethics and the reasons why we need to protect our children, our families and our firends from data abuse as well as the scale of fines (and prison sentences). Ensure they understand the benefit of keeping clean and secure data. Incentivise employees to spot and fix or report any errors made in data processing.

Communications

Communicate to all staff – from Board Level down to operators, the importance of GDPR.  Make it part of all regular reporting so that meetings at every level have GDPR on the agenda. Create and refer to Data KPIs.

Training

Anyone handling personal data is now legally obliged to be trained (under the GDPR). Staff must be trained so they understand the 6 basic data protection principles (article 5):

1. Consent – did you get consent? Processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to individuals
2. Purpose – was the data collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes
3. Adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed
4. Accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date
5. Kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary
6. Processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data

Source ICO (Information Commissioners Office)

Can you prove that you are compliant with GDPR?

Remember: The Burden of Proof Is On The DC

Under the GDPR the burden of proof is on the DC (Data Controller) to verify that it received lawful consent.

• It must be clearly distinguishable from other matters.
• Data Privacy Notice needs to be intelligible, easily accessible and in clear and plain language.
• It must be as easy to withdraw consent as it is to give it.
• If a service to be delivered is conditional on providing consent to personal data processing, then that consent isn’t deemed to be ‘freely given’ and isn’t valid.

Ardi Kolah, Henley Business School

12 Steps/Actions Preparing for GDPR (ICO )

Security of data is a critical factor

Source: unknown
 

How To Create GDPR-Compliant Consent Forms

• Request as little data as possible
• Make the terms and conditions clear
• Make it easy to withdraw consent
• Use a double opt-in mechanism‘

Source: IT Governance

A double opt-in mechanism stops individuals from giving their consent by mistake. The first step involves a regular opt-in tick-box (consent form).  This is followed by an automated email with a link that they need to click on to verify, or confirm, their consent.

CONTROL

Are you in control of your data?

Here’s 7 Data Protection Questions To Answer Before Some Banks Will Do Business With You

Data assets can become toxic if not adhering to GDPR. Gilbert Hill founder, One Trust, revealed that one bank told him that they won’t ‘do business with you unless you can tell me:

1. How you collect data?
   2. How you use it?
   3. How you protect it?
   4. How you secure it?
   5. How you clean it?
   6. How you give it back to users?
   7. How you check it every six months?

It is recommended that you clean up your data regularly (Gilbert Hill recommends every 6 months & suggests ‘It can be less risky to bin data and start again’ (rather than keeping unclean data).   All of this is simply good customer service and excellent marketing practice. GDPR ultimately protects and improves the CX (customer experience).  So if you really care about your customers, you should embrace GDPR with open arms.

GDPR Responsibility starts with the board of directors and works across the organisation everyone’s responsibility [image reproduced with kind permission of Henley Business School]

Another 6 Questions to check you are in control of your customers’ personal data

John Culkin, Director of Information Management, Crown Records Management highlights these 6 ‘must-have’ answers regarding customer data:

1. What you have?
2. Where is it?
3. Where are you sending it?
4. Why do you have it (what do you do with it)?
5. What form is it in?
6. How long do you need to keep it?

2 Crunch Questions

Can you prove that you have collected data legally and morally?

Can you prove that it is secure?

Other Regulators (beyond the ICO)

The ICO won’t be the only regulator involved. FCA, the Environment Agency, General Pharamaceutical Council, Ofcom, CMA, Care Quality Commission and many more.

Summary

So there you have – SOME of the details of GDPR. We have looked at some  GDPR Tactics you must employ, followed by SOME more detailed action checklists and finally to ensure you are in control of your GDPR destiny, we looked at some of what you need to monitor and control. Part 1 introduced GDPR Situation which is a shock for many businesses and Part 2 explored Strategy. Embracing GDPR means protecting and caring for your customers’ personal data and this is a good thing. This will help to build a powerful data asset that help your organisation to fulfil its goals. The future looks bright when you embrace GDPR.

The future looks bright when you embrace GDPR

Thanks to

Many thanks to Ardi Kolah, Henley Business School for the inspiration.

Please note this blog post is not a comprehensive set of legal guidelines. To complete your GDPR preparation, we advise you to check your local Information Commissioner Office or your Data Protection Commissioner.

Further Information

Information Commissioner’s Office (UK)

Data Protection Commissioner (Irl)

If you enjoyed this you might also enjoy:

Part 1 GDPR:  Opportunity to Boost CX or a Threat of Closure?

Part 2 GDPR: Objectives and Strategy

How Trump Won by analysing data to deliver extremely relevant and highly targeted messages that worked.

How To Write The Perfect Plan in 4 minutes using the SOSTAC ® Planning Framework (4 min. video)

References

Armstrong, Jonathan (2017) Cordery: ‘All you need to know about GDPR but were too afraid to ask’, GDPR Conference Europe, 27 Apr

Cameron, Gareth (2017) ICO: ‘The pathway to implementation’, GDPR Conference Europe, 27 Apr

Kolah, Ardi (2017) Henley Business School: Sizing the risk – carrying out a data protection impact assessment Lite

Miller, Nigel (2017) Fox Williams:  Individuals’ Rights Under The GDPR, GDPR Conference Europe, 27 Apr

Smith, PR (2018) SOSTAC^® Guide to your perfect digital marketing plan

SOSTAC^® Portal for SOSTAC^® Certified Planners

Thanks to 

Ardi Kolah, Executive Fellow & Programme Co-Director, GDPR Transition Programme, Henley Business school, University of Reading.

Nick James, CEO of Amplified Business Content, hosts of GDPR Europe Conference

Ruairi Thomas, MD, DST Systems for the gold-fish observation!

The post GDPR Tactics Action & Control (Part 3) appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Continuing from How Trump Won – part 1 – SOSTAC ® Analysis, where we looked at the first three stages of the plan: Situation Analysis (where was Trump?); Objectives (where did he want to go?) & Strategy (how was he going to get there?), now let’s explore Tactics (the details of strategy); Action (how to ensure excellent execution) and Control (how do we know we are getting there?). In particular, we’ll explore how he used, what I call, the Magic Marketing Formula to win.

PR Smith’s SOSTAC® Planning Framework www.SOSTAC.org

Tactics

Tactics include the marketing mix and this includes the communications mix. So whether it is a facebook ad, a social media post or tweet, a conference speech or any tactical tool, the key (apart from targeting) is to ensure the right message is shared (or ‘reflected to the audience’). This is, what I call, the Magic Marketing Formula.

The Magic Marketing Formula – IRD

The Magic Marketing Formula: IRD

Here it is: Identify (needs); Reflect (those needs with solutions or sometimes just slogans) back to your audience; Deliver (a reasonable product or service).

Make America Great Again = Magic Marketing Formula

Let’s start with the general message (the slogan that was used everywhere). This was shared (or reflected back to all audiences).  We will look at other, more specific messages, including ‘dark posts’, sent exclusively to very specific audiences (that others could not see easily as they targeted discrete audiences after they had profiled the personality of every adult in the USA – 220 million profiles). More on this in Part 3. But, first, let’s look at Trump’s slogan.

“Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ was designed to make white working-class men remember when things were better for them or, at least, they thought they could remember.” Stephen Greyser, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School    Fottrell (2016).

‘Make America Great Again’ has a certain ‘darkness at the edge of that slogan as there is (also) a darkness at the edge of ‘Take Back Our Country’ (the Brexit Leave Campaign) & yet there’s also a glimmer of a legitimate & important aspiration in both of those slogans. … …. the legitimate aspiration underlying those slogans has to do with a sense of national community’ (Harvard’s Professor Sandel 2017). Trump addressed the people’s anger. Perhaps Clinton assumed the anger was against immigration and trade, and at the heart of that, is jobs. ‘But it’s also about even bigger things., about the loss of community, disempowerment, & social esteem (a sense that the work that ordinary people do is no longer honoured & recognised (& rewarded).’ Sandel (2017). So the need for community (national community), amongst other needs is reflected back through the consistent use of the slogan. Therefore appealing to hidden needs, needs that perhaps, many voters weren’t even conscious of during their voting. 

Professor Michael Sandel, speaking at Davos 2017

Professor Sandel continues: ‘The language of patriotism has been appropriated by the right for the most part. There’s no reason why centre-left parties can’t reclaim and articulate their own conception of national purpose, national community and shared identity & patriotism. What the elite missed was the sources of the anger & resentment that has lead to the populist upheavals in the US & Britain & many other parts of the world.

Pavlovian Conditioning?

Although Trump is part of a different establishment (business establishment) swing voters seemed to accept his carefully controlled positioning as a non-establishment politician (see part 1: Positioning) . Perhaps a Pavlovian conditioning – repeating the same message again and again and after a while his audience believed this, despite seeing Trump flying around the country in his “Trump” branded 757 plane. Perhaps because by doing so he showcased an aspirational lifestyle that appealed to white, working-class Americans (NB the magic marketing formula: identify needs/aspirations – reflect them back, ironically, via your own mobile media/your own private jet).

Is it possible that Donald Trump conditioned voters just like Russian physiologist, Dr. Ivan Pavlov, conditioned dogs back in 1902? www.PRSmith.org/SOSTAC

Tactics: Proposition: ‘Change’

The promise of ‘change’ worked for Obama previously & this time it worked for Trump too. Interestingly, both Trump and Obama (in previous Obama campaigns) identified that many people still want change.  Obama promised it in a positive light ‘whilst Trump used anger to get it across’ (Kanski 2016). However, this time, Trump went after the disenchanted relentlessly and rammed home his message of ‘angry change’.

“In the end it was a clear-cut message: If you’re happy with the status quo, vote for her; if you want change, vote for me,” said Dan Scandling, senior director of public affairs at APCO Worldwide. “That was what resonated.”
“She (Clinton) never effectively communicated how she was going to make people’s lives better beyond hanging her hat on the last eight years,” says Aaron Gordon, partner at Schwartz Media. (Kanski 2016).

Clinton’s more rational (and longer) economic and social arguments might have missed the attention span of those swing voters, as did the ‘Remain’ campaign in the UK’s now notorious Brexit referendum. Lord Heseltine (former UK Deputy Prime Minister under John Major and Secretary of State under Margaret Thatcher ) summed up short attention spans, lack of facts and policies, when referring to the UK’s Brexit, he pointed the finger at one of its ‘Leave Campaign’ leaders who has since become the UK’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, and said:

“How convenient to substitute a slogan in place of arguments you have not got.”  (Rogers 2016)

As our attention spans have shrunk from 42 seconds in 1960 (see How Trump Won part 1) to 5 seconds in 2008 and now 4 seconds, the words of John C. Maxwell (‘leadership’ author) resonate more profoundly:

John C Maxwell (leadership author)

Proposing What Audiences LikeTo Hear (IRD)

‘What that translates into is a constant iterative process whereby he (Trump) experiments with pushing the conversation this way or that, and he sees how the crowd responds. If they like it, he goes there. If they don’t respond, he never goes there again, because he doesn’t want to be boring. If they respond by getting agitated, that’s a lot better than being bored. That’s how he learns….. In that sense, he’s perfectly objective, as in morally neutral. He just follows the numbers. He could be replaced by a robot that acts on a machine learning algorithm’ (O’Neil 2016).

Through data analysis (big data) Trump was able to send different messages to different groups of voters with different needs. ‘Cutting immigration’ or “draining the swamp” of corrupt or incompetent politicians and bureaucrats – messages were targeted only at those that connected with these messages. (I’m going to have to do a Part 3 to explain how this worked).

‘Once up and running at the end of the summer, it was soon sending out tailored messages to 100,000 targeted voters every day’ (Marr 2017).

See the BBC video in Part 1 that explains exactly how Cambridge Analytica analysed the adult voting population of America (without them knowing their data was being used in this way) and subsequently targeting precise ads to each personality type telling them just what they wanted to hear.

Proposition, Message Credibility & Messages

Trump reached many disenchanted blue collar male voters by reflecting his messages in their language e.g. by ‘talking about the world and globalism in terms of winners and losers,’ Eric Bovim (Kanski 2016). Not everyone can understand social economics, but everyone understands the concept of winners and losers. Short. Simple. And not weighed down by actual facts or policies.

Having said that, if a significant proportion of the voting population do not want to hear long-winded arguments, then Trump just applied the Magic Marketing Formula (IRD) again and again, by keeping it short, tapping into fears and emotions, reflecting keywords that connect, but avoiding detail at all costs.

Trump Is A ‘Meaningfully Different Brand’

‘Meaningfully different brands’ are much more likely to be selected, to command greater premiums and to grow in the future,” says Christopher Murphy, chief client officer at brand analysts, Millward Brown North America.

Q1 Does the candidate meaningfully connect – either functionally or emotionally?

Q2 Is the candidate seen as different or capable of driving positive change?”

Trump, Murphy concluded, did both (Fottrell 2016).

Tactical Tool –  twitter

Trump’s preferred vehicle to spread his message was largely his Twitter feed. He built his momentum on Twitter, spreading the #MakeAmericaGreatAgain or #MAGA hashtag widely.  12 million followers (9 Nov –  now 16.4m)
Clinton’s Twitter feed (11.4m) felt more traditional and political (Kanski  2016). Clinton’s slogan ‘Stronger Together’ did not generate nearly as much traction. It is possible to predict which tweets/messages will get the most retweets (see IBM twitter analysis). Though I could have forecasted ‘Stronger Together’ was limp and wouldn’t gain much traction.

Tactical Tool –  Targeting Facebook Ads: 1,000% Increase in Sales

Jared Kushner (Trump’s son in law) who set up the stage 2 Strategy (see Part 1), database decision making and highly targeted facebook ads (& other cable TV targeted ads), also quickly learned how to continually refine the targeting of facebook ads. See 200 variables available to target specific messages. In fact, he quickly increased the sales of Trump merchandising (e.g. baseball caps with ‘Make America Great Again’) from $8,000 to $80,000 per day – ‘simply by refining the target demographic’ (Marr 2017).

ACTION

Build A Campaign Team 

Soon, Jared Kushner, was assembling a speech and policy team, handling Trump’s schedule and managing the finances.

Build A Data Centre

As mentioned in Part 1, within three weeks, in a nondescript building outside San Antonio, Kushner built what would become a 100-person data hub designed to unify:

• fundraising
• messaging
• targeting

They also tapped into the ‘Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change’ (Bertoni 2016) . Forbes reported: ‘Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration.

Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.’

Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface

Very quickly data determined decisions, so just like Teddy Goff and previous Obama campaigns, data dictated almost every campaign decision including:

• travel
• fundraising
• advertising
• rally locations
• topics of the speeches

Big Data is everywhere

Build A Disruptive Start-Up Culture

Kushner was unschooled in traditional campaigning, he was, therefore, able to look at the business of politics in the same way that so many entrepreneurs analyse and attack other bloated industries.

Learn Rapidly

Kushner knew what he needed to know. He knew what he needed to learn and learn it quickly. So in Kushner’s own words: “I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff? They gave me their subcontractors. I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting.” Synched with Trump’s blunt, simple messaging, this would go on to work very well.

Constant Beta Testing 

Constant beta Testing = Constant Learning = Constant Improvement. Trump was selling $8,000 worth of hats and other items per day. Bit by bit Kushner learned how to improve this with better targeting via facebook ads.  Once they found something worked – they scaled it up. Result: sales grew from £8k to $80k per day thus:

• generating revenue
• expanding the number of human billboards

Constant Beta Testing requires a cultural shift which, in turn, requires constant monitoring and control (see ‘Control’ section). 

No Fear Of Failure 

The entrepreneurial spirit / disruptive start-up culture ensured that there was no fear of failure just a hunger for fast improvement & scalability.  “We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly,” Kushner says. “It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked.” (Bertoni 2016).

“We weren’t afraid to fail.” Kushner

Scale Up What Works  –  Tailor Targeted Ads

Scale What Works & Stop What Doesn’t – quickly.  Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones were scaled up. Trump’s team ended up sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day.

Use Machine Learning 

Machine learning helped to boost their fundraising efforts. Kushner installed digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. If anyone has more information on how Donald Trump’s team used machine learning, please do let me know, as I will be doing a Part 3 about Big Data helped Trump to win. 

Control

Sales Revenues & Donations 

The Trump team monitored revenues every day. The campaign raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors. They kept monitoring and learning what worked best and then scaled up.

Constant Real-Time Analysis 

Constant up-to-the-minute voter data, provided both ample cash and the insight on where to spend it. ‘When the campaign registered the fact that momentum in Michigan and Pennsylvania was turning Trump’s way, Kushner unleashed tailored TV ads, last-minute rallies and thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls’ (Bertoni). See Part 3 (‘How Big Data helped Trump’.

Ask Great Questions

Kushner asked this seemingly basic question which really focussed the campaign team’s minds: “How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did (Bertoni 2016).

Monitor Bangs For Your Buck

Kushner even spent $160,000 to promote a series of low-tech Trump policy videos which generated more than 74 million views which equated $2 CPT (Cost Per Thousand people reached). In addition to getting more cost effective, Kushner was learning which video messages worked best.

Constant Beta Testing

“We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,… Kushner

Monitor Twitter Streams 

Using 3,000 tweets from Trump and 3,000 from Clinton, here is Trump’s most frequently used words visualised in a word-cloud:

Trump’s Word Cloud identifying his most frequently used words

Here is Clinton’s most frequently used words:

Clinton’s Word Cloud identifying her most popular words

Trump’s most common words used in his tweets were positive (i.e., great, will, thank, as well as the hashtag #MAKEAMERICAGREATAGAIN). These all have positive meanings. Clinton’s most frequently used word on Twitter was trump (NB lower case disrespect!). What does this tell you?

Incidentally, it is possible to predict how successful* a tweet will be (or predict the performance of a selection of tweets and thus select the best one to send). * One success criteria is the number of retweets forecasted (within a certain level of confidence) Cortana 2016. If you enjoy data mining, you might enjoy this from Microsoft’s machine learning people. Everything generates feedback and learning, which is fed back into the system to update the situation analysis, refine objectives, inform strategy and tactics as you can see in the diagram below.  part 3 will explore how door-door canvassers fed back data regarding which message worked best for each household.

Control monitors and collects feedback which is constantly used to update all other sections of a SOSTAC® plan.

In the end….

crystal clear positioning and targeting driven by clever use of data layered on top of the Magic Marketing Formula combined with a ‘disruptive start-up’ attitude’ always ready to learn and constantly improve every hour – delivered Trump, the outsider, the most unexpected of wins (despite winning less than 2 million votes than Clinton). As Forbe’s Bertoni reports:

‘If the campaign’s overarching sentiment was fear and anger, the deciding factor at the end was data and entrepreneurship.’

‘Trump looked at the US and correctly saw an anxious populace that was ripe for facile answers, scapegoats and a narrative of unjust victimisation. So he pounced.’ Frank Bruni, New York Times, 14 Dec 2018

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See How Trump Won part 1 – Situation Analysis, Objectives and the critical Strategic choices (the BBC video explaining how Cambridge Analytica analysed a nation of voters).

You might also enjoy How Obama Became America’s First Black President

You might not enjoy, but perhaps need to read:  The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture – Using Data & IRD

How SOSTAC® Works – a 4 minute video by PR Smith

How SOSTAC® Works – a 4 minute video by PR Smith

Become a SOSTAC® Certified Planner  visit www.SOSTAC.org

The SOSTAC® Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan

The new SOSTAC(r) Guide for Digital Marketers

Sources:

Bertoni, S. (2016)   How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House , Forbes December 20

Cortana Intelligence & Machine Learning (2016) Data Mining the 2016 Presidential Campaign Finance Data, Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog, 10 Oct

Economist (2016) The post-truth world: Yes, I’d lie to you, 10 Sep

Flood, A. (2016) ‘Post-truth’ named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, The Guardian, 15 Nov.

Fottrell (2016) How TV reality star Donald Trump won the election with his ‘disruptive’ brand, MarketWatch.com 11 Nov.

Grassegger, H. & Krogerus, M. (2017), The Data That Turned the World Upside Down, Motherboard, 28 Jan

IBM (2016) Trump and Clinton may have used some Machine Learning, DataScience.ibm.com , 21 Dec  http://datascience.ibm.com/blog/election-2016-data-analysis/

Kanski, A. (2016) Change and authenticity: The messages that won over American voters, PR Week 09 Nov.

Marr, B. (2017) Why Big Data Wasn’t Trump’s Achilles Heel After All, Forbes 9 Feb

O’Neil, C. (2016) Donald Trump is like a biased machine learning algorithm, Mathbabe.org 11 Aug

Rogers, D. (2016) The Politics of Fear, in an interview with Lord Heseltein, PR Week, April 2016.

Sandel, M. (2017) ‘ Why The Democrats are so out of touch with the People‘, World Economic Forum, Davos 2017 – (a very interesting video).

The post How Trump Won (Part 2) – using the Magic Marketing Formula – a SOSTAC Planning Analysis appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Shell VP Media Relations recently gave an interview to one the UK’s major PR magazines, PR Week, presumably to boost credibility or to raise its profile, but instead, this main feature interview effectively ended with these words from the interviewer:

‘So Shell finds itself incapable of doing anything other than selling a product that is destroying the planet.’  

Benady (2015)

Media interviews are one of PR (Public Relations) much sought after tools. However PR is different to other communications tools like advertising, since PR has a low cost, yet high credibility but with very low control (over the message). Credibility of the message is deemed a lot higher via PR generated editorial coverage (as readers assume it’s a journalist who writes it when often it is simply a well written news release) than messages delivered via advertising. The negative quote about Shell demonstrates the uncontrollable nature of PR (compared to advertising where you can control the message).

Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword

I once was bitten by some negative editorial exposure when, ironically, I launched an award winning,  training video about PR, called ‘Actions Speak Louder Than Words’ with Emma Freud presenting amidst 3 screens packing in 90 mins of action into a 30 min video broken into 6 sections with onscreen questions at the beginning of each section.

It was before the internet and went on to win awards and sell very well. As our primary target market was PR people, journalists, media and marketing people, we gave a limited edition Parker Pen made from smelted nuclear missiles (SS16 and Persian Missiles) complete with a certificate of authenticity and donation to a children’s war charity. The pens were the same as those used by Gorbachov and Reagan when the signed the nuclear peace treaty. The news release went out and next day we were on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Later that week we gota two page spread in a key magazine, Training Today, with the following words whcih I will never forget:

Any Publicity Is NOT Good Publicity

‘Award of the year for gratuitous bad taste goes to PR Smith and his PR Training Video company, PRTV.’ Ouch! Live by the sword – die by the sword (since journalists believe the pen is mightier than the sword!). Absolutely no control over the message but very low cost (just a couple of hundred quid). I guess despite the negative press coverage, it did spread the message but not in an ideal format. You can read the full case in  Marketing Communications 6th ed. by Smith and Zook (2016).

Don’t ever believe ‘any publicity is good publicity – where is Gerald Ratner now?’ Where is Gerald Ratner and his international jewelery chains now? . After he told the press that his jewellery was ‘crap’, his business went downhill.

Develop Credibility Before Raising Visibility

The old adage: ‘Develop Credibility Before raising Visibility‘ makes a lot of sense in business. The corollary makes a lot of sense: ‘Having Developed Credibility, Don’t Destroy It With Stupid High Visibility Comments’ as in the case of Gerald Ratner.

So the risk you take with low cost, high credibility tools like PR is clearly seen in this PR Week interview with Shell’s VP Media Relations, Andy Norman. Had Andy known that the interviewer, Alex Benady, was going to finish the interview with a paragraph shown below, would he have done the interview in the first place? Andy, if you are out there, please let me know or, perhaps share your advice for others regarding the risk return trade-off between lack of message control, low cost and high credibility of message.

‘So Shell finds itself incapable of doing anything other than selling a product that is destroying the planet. Faced with shareholders who will not compromise  on their returns and consumers who refuse refuse to compromise on their consumption, it will take all Norman’s powers of engagement to square that particular circle.’ Bernady 2015

Perhaps some of Shell’s legacy is biasing journalists? Shell’s underground (allegedly) ‘raw’ gas pipe in Co. Mayo, Ireland split the community, imprisoned teachers and provoked a documentary movie called ‘The Pipe’.

Another documentary, called ‘Pipe Down’ explored the issue and challenged Shell’s actions (60 minute documentary).

Regardless of who wins the case, does this controversial project, or any other controversial events (Shell in Nigeria, Smith 2016)  generate a lingering negative feeling towards a brand like Shell? Perhaps it generates negative attitudes amongst journalists and influencers, long after the controversial project has ‘calmed down’? is it possible that this project or other stories influenced the journalist writing the piece?

Would It Work On Blab.im?

I just wonder how this interview would have worked if it was done on Blab.im (ie via a mobile with a live video feed and video recording capturing, for posterity, the reactions from the interview and a finishing comment like that).

Blab.im screen grab: 3 of the 4 panel seats taken and 3 panelists in heated discussion while an external audience watches – all done on a mobile phone.

The Uncontrollable Nature of PR

So, regardless of what platform you use (whether Blab.TV, TV, Mainstream Media, News Distribution specialists,Social Media etc.), PR is simply not controllable. Editors and journalists can change the intended message.

The Power Of Creative PR 

Having said that, there are many news releases published  in the media, verbatim, carrying the exact intended message (with high credibility as it is deemed to be written by a journalist) to a carefully targeted audience.  There are also examples where a great image or video can generate massive coverage (as in the ‘swimming pool in the sky’ image (below), which incidentally wasn’t a photograph but rather, it was a graphic image created by a designer.

Ballymore Developers Graphic Image of a swimming pool suspended between two building in London generated a huge response

This image was created and distributed to the media (with a press release). It generated almost 1 billion impressions (valued at £10m), boosted awareness and helped to generate sales of £21m of the Embassy Gardens Apartment Blocks. See How To Integrate & Leverage A Great Image For Max Impact for the full story of this very creative news release. The image also prompted renowned award-winning,  Irish chef, Robin Gill to move in and set up his new Darby’s Restaurant in the Embassy Gardens.

In summary, PR, as a tactical tool, is highly credible, but uncontrollable yet very cost effective when you get it right.

PR =  Low Cost, High Credibility and almost No Control.

—end—

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy:

How To Integrate & Leverage A Great Image For Max Impact.

or

How Integrated Content Marketing Creates Competitive Advantage

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References:

Benady, A. (2015) The Energy To Change Our Minds – The Interview, with Andy Norman, PR Week, Sept.

Smith, PR & Zook, Z. (2016) Marketing Communications 6th ed offline & online integration, engagement and analytics, Kogan Page

White, Roisín (2020) – thanks for information re the top floor connecting pool image prompting award-winning chef to set up a restaurant in the block.

The post Low Cost, High Credibility But Uncontrollable – PR Horror Story appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Staff Advocate Eats Dinner Off Subway Station Floor

Now that is commitment. That is motivation. When a member of staff believes that the floor cleaner they sell is so good that he cleans a subway floor, then pours his dinner on it, opens his serviette, tucks it into his collar and proceeds to eat his dinner off the floor, so that he can make a video that demonstrates the power of his company’s product.  Do not try this at home!

This employee is sufficiently motivated that he made his own ‘Shockvertising’ video for his company.  Will this shockvertising staff-made ad start a surge of employee product demonstration ads?

Staff need to be integrated

What does this mean? Well, every customer-facing member of staff is a brand ambassador. They have to feel part of it. They have to integrate with the brand values (sometimes they are selected in accordance with the brand values). This requires internal marketing (investing in internal communications, motivation and training). If you get this right, staff can become your most potent comms tool.

Now, have a look at this member of staff who made his own youtube product demonstration video – eating his dinner off the subway floor (after he cleaned it with his hard floor cleaner that both vacuums and steams).

Staff advocacy. This is staff advocacy. How many companies’ staff use their own company’s products and services? How many are passionate about their products and services & become real advocates?

Integrate staff and promotion/comms

Integrating inbound and outbound with online and offline communications delivers higher impact and more cost-effective ‘joined-up marketing’. Any staff wanting to produce promotional materials (like a video) obviously need to check with the Marketing Communications team to ensure it fits (integrates) with all other comms.

Integrate the marketing mix

As promotions (like this ad) become part of the brand experience, they become part of the product. Similarly, Location-based advertising is ‘promotion’, but it is also ‘place’ (as it extends the distribution/places where you can buy) and so it becomes part of the brand experience. You can see how the marketing mix is morphing into a brand experience. You can see how people, physical evidence, process and price have to be integrated carefully to ensure a consistent CX (customer experience).

Integrate customer data

Since customers are touched by many contact points or ‘touch points’ such as social media, Point Of Sale, ads, email etc. Customers need a consistent (integrated) message. Equally, companies are collecting information from many different customer touch points (web site registration, web site body language, customer service, social media and much more). It’s a gold mine if they collect this safely and store it safely in a data warehouse and then use it all to build better profiles of customers. Customer data needs to be integrated. This a major challenge for many organisations.

Unintegrated databases cause many problems and complications, as there is no single picture of the customer and therefore customers have many different types of experiences and messages form the brand. This confuses customers and dilutes the brand’s presence in the marketplace.

Staff Advocates Are Powerful

It is a nice endorsement – staff that use the company’s products and services. After all they are at the coal face, the place where customers meet the real live breathing brand. One sloppy comment, facial reaction, posture or even dirty nail can kill a sale (or stop repeat sales). On the other hand, staff that are proud of their products is often the ultimate endorsement. Are your staff passionate about your products and services?

How can you get them onside? Internal marketing – training, motivation and communication.

Reproduced from Chapter 1, Marketing Communications 6th ed. (2016) by PR Smith & Ze Zook, published by Kogan Page.

Get the Free Download Chapter 1: Marketing Communications -offline and online integration, engagement and analytics

Or get the book and spend £8 on yourself ie get 20% Discount off off the £39.99 price tag. Go to: http://www.koganpage.com/marketingcommunications and then insert the password:  FRIENDSOFPAUL&ZE                   (and Yes the ampersand is part of the password). Treat yourself to something nice as you save £8.

#Marcomms #Integration

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How To Leverage A Graphic Image To Get Maximum Impact

– The Sky Pool 

Embassy Gardens

This stunning computer-generated image from the Ballymore Group was leveraged/used across multiple channels:

• News Release distributed to luxury, trade (construction, property, architecture, design), international, London and national press online & offline
• Social media
• Web site
• Conference slide shows
• Award entries
• Marketing suites
• All marketing collateral

Results: Coverage  

The news release generated 1billion ‘opportunities to see’, 105 apartment enquiries, £27 million apartment sales and an award-winning chef opening his new restaurant in the same development. In fact, it generated just under a 1billion OTS’s (972,126,464) Opportunities To See (OTS)  calculated using readership figures for the various outlets where the image appeared in the usual media outlets (ie online & offline media). Note this did not include social media coverage/shares/likes/comments etc.

Results: Sales Leads

Within 24 hours of the image first appearing, it generated 105 new sales leads (from people wanting to buy an apartment). Apartment prices in the second phase went from £602,000 up to almost £2million, so if, say, the average apartment price was £1.3m and if, say, just 20% of leads normally convert to sales, then the 105 leads generated will convert to an estimated 21 apartments sold at an average price of £1.3m, which, equals £27m revenue generated by this image (& the idea behind it).  The image also prompted renowned award-winning,  Irish chef, Robin Gill to move in and set up his new Darby’s Restaurant in the Embassy Gardens.

Results: Profile Raising/Awareness Building

This image has also increased awareness of (and perhaps preference for) the Ballymore Group.

Where did the idea come from?

The Sky Pool was an idea formed by Sean Mulryan, founder and CEO of Ballymore Group, whose vision stemmed from a desire to push the boundaries in the capability of construction and engineering – to push the boundaries on all aspects of design. Sky Pool’s transparent structure is the result of significant advancements in technologies over the last decade. As such, Mulryan brought in not only architects and engineers but also aquarium designers to ensure the pool is at the forefront of design excellence. The pool will actually be made of acrylic rather than glass – and the experience of the pool will be truly unique, it will feel like floating through the air in central London.

Brief Excerpt From The Brief:

‘Do something that had never been done before’

PR Low Cost, High Credibility but No Control

Note: PR has very low costs, very high Credibility of message (higher than say, an advertisement in the UK) but no Control (as an editor or journalist can challenge or even rebuke a news release). So PR, like advertising and sponsorship is great at generating awareness (not as efficient at generating sales). Advertising has very high control of message, very high cost and lower credibility of message (compared to PR). Sponsorship sits in the middle.

See the savagely uncontrollable nature of PR and the consequences for Shell

Low Cost, High Credibility But Uncontrollable – PR Horror Story

If you like this, you might also like:

The Tactical Matrix – Choosing Which Tool – Owned, Earned or Paid Media

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The post How To Integrate & Leverage Great Graphics For Max Impact appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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‘This seat is taken’ – a clever caption combined with a creative photograph – this image (plus caption) went viral during President Obama’s last campaign.

Recruit The Best People

When president Obama invited Teddy Goff to be his Digital Director, Obama took a big step towards becoming America’s next president.  Goff is the best in the business.

Have a Great Product

Equally, Goff only backed this horse, since he knew he had a great product (Obama) to market. Being a great digital marketer won’t work if you got a lousy product.

Combine Analytics With Creative Thinking

Interestingly Goff and his team spent a lot of time on analytics and segmenting and targeting messages as you’d expect. They spent even more time on creative thinking creatively about how to keep the information fatigued audience excited and invigorated sufficiently to (a) vote (b) encourage a friend to vote (c) perhaps get involved in the campaign. For more on Engagement see the Ladder of Engagement (Smith & Zook 2016, Marketing Communications). Here’s Teddy talking to me about all of the above. I apologise about the video (visual) quality. Please try to ignore it and just listen to what Teddy has to say.

Use Big Data

Everything they did was informed by data.  This helped Goff et al to give their followers a better experience. To serve their supporters with the best experience possible.

With literally, millions of volunteers on the ground. Goff: “We wanted to use the stuff that people were telling us about. So if someone clicks on this email rather than that one, it’s probably because they are a little bit more interested in this, rather than that.” They consequently would segment and target relevant content that matched the precise interests of people with similar interests (segments).  It’s not rocket science. Goff’s team used the knowledge they gathered from digital behaviour to infer broaden patterns e.g. ‘does it seem that people who care about veterans are more likely to vote for the president?’ I apologise about the poor quality visuals – try to focus on what Teddy Goff actually says. It’s gold dust.

So the same principle was applied to offline e.g. millions of volunteers knocking on doors, understanding what were the key issues and interests of undecided voters, helped campaigners to have more relevant conversations. This campaign had to integrate offline with online. For more on integrated marketing communications see the end of this post.

Target Multiple Self Referencing Sub Cultures with Distinct Value Propositions

Ok let’s call it multiple niche marketing! Think about what people care about and the dimensions around which they want to self-organise (group together). Goff and his team tried to create a platform which helped people to organise themselves around particular interests in particular areas e.g. women, interested in a certain issue, all from a certain state. And “let them form connections that they cared about rather than force them into relationships that might not be as meaningful to them.” says  Goff. Apologies for the poor visual quality of this video.

Use The Magic Marketing Formula

This is what I call the ‘Magic Marketing Formula. IRD.

• Identify Needs
• Reflect those needs (through ads, social media or any comms tool)
• Deliver (a reasonable product or service

Once a customer’s (voter’s) need (topic or issue) is identified, it can be reflected by either presenting solutions to that issue or by helping people to set up groups dedicated to this particular issue. This information can be collected from door-to-door conversations or even from digital body language (or click behaviour which is revealed by, for example, spending more time on certain pages/topics/issues than others).

Social media, and facebook in particular, generated 34 million Obama fans who in turn were connected with  98% of the facebook population of the USA. They could reach almost everyone, whereas no other media could do this.

Be Relevant – Target Different Segments With Different Messages

Goff’s team worked hard to break their audiences into dozens of discrete segments – so they could target more relevant messages to each group. They also never sat back. They kept trying to keep the connection, keep the engagement, keep the relationship with individuals. Look at the subject lines (headlines) in this fascinating graphic from NY Mag

Subject lines form Obama’s emails worked hard to keep the relationship engaging and friendly

Treat Your Staff Well

You might have noticed Teddy saying earlier (in the first video) that their primary focus in this campaign was on their supporters. Many of these were volunteers. Many of the rest could at least spread the word. As they say in business: ‘Happy Employees = Happy Customers = Happy Shareholders’, well you could argue the same principle applies here too.

Or perhaps there are alternative tactics such as Democrat, Hilary Clinton secretly funding, Republican, Donald Trump?

A SOSTAC® Summary Of The Election Campaign

PR Smith’s SOSTAC(r) Planning System

Situation Analysis: Team Obama used Data Analytics & Big Data to analyse the situation in great detail. In fact, all ‘decisions were data driven. Key issues are analysed and identified. Key phrases are analysed and identified so they can be used (or reflected) during the campaign. undecided voters were analysed and their key issues identified.

Objectives: Clear objectives were broken down from quarterly goals, to monthly goals, to weekly goals and daily goals.

Strategy: Most of the strategic components of TOPPP SITE were used. President Obama was positioned as an agent of change. [Positioning] Interestingly Teddy’s team focussed primarily on supporters. Segmenting them and serving them very carefully with relevant content. [Targeting]. Engaging them with regular relevant content. Engaging them by empowering them to set up and run their own clusters [Engagement]. He ensured he had a developed, credible product (Obama) before attempting to raise visibility [Sequence]. When he needed to raise visibility, he prioritised social media since it could reach parts of America that traditional media simply could not [Tactical Tools]. He used analytics and big data (all their ‘decisions were driven by data’) [Process]. Offline was integrated with online events and activities e.g. The President dining with 3 dollar voters was an offline event but when video recorded, it generated a lot of coverage online via social media [Integration].

Tactics: This the details of strategy, e.g. the marketing mix. At the heart of this is the product. Obama was a good product.In fact Teddy Goff recommendation to young people in marketing is to ensure you have a good product before doing any marketing. All the other elements of the mix needed to be managed carefully.

Action: This is the details of tactics. How to ensure continual excellent execution, day in, day out. This can be a work culture (so treat staff well) e.g. a relentless A/B culture continually testing and improving to find what works half a percentage better, and then optimising on what works best. it can also include checklists, procedures, training & motivation plus internal communications to ensure excellent execution.

Control: The objectives set earlier were  broken down and measured continually. A team was allocated to monitor and report on key variables on a daily basis e.g. any blips in sentiment analysis (an aggregate score of the mood of the American nation with reference to the presidential candidates) would have been spotted and brought to the attention of the campaign team.

For more on SOSTAC® Planning System and Certified SOSTAC® Planners see www.PRSmith.org/SOSTAC

See How Trump Won

See The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture – Using Data & IRD

For more on Integrated Marketing Communications, The Ladder Of Engagement, Social Media , Marketing Content, Big Data, Segmentation, the Magic Marketing Formula and how to write the perfect plan see Marketing Communications, by myself and Ze Zook.

The 3 Things You Can Learn From Jeb Bush’s Disaster by Chris Matyszczyk

1. Understand Your Customer and Your Competitor

Bush seemed to grasp neither. He, like many other professional politicians, had no idea why Donald Trump was so popular. He therefore had no idea how to compete. Should he ignore him? Should he try and fight him toe-to-toe? Should he appeal to his essential reasonableness? In the end, Bush fell between all stools. He had no feel for a market that was fueled by anger at the system, rather than at any specific issue or policy. He came as off as slightly bemused and unable to cope alone. Trump was right. When you have to bring your mom and your brother on stage, you’ve lost confidence in yourself.

2. Develop Credibility Before Raising Visibility

‘They’re learning this one in Silicon Valley too. They think that all they need to do is raise a ton of money from gullible VCs and everything will be fine. Bush seemed to have the largest coffers. However, the more money was coughed up, the more the candidate stumbled. Until he was humbled. In the end, it’s the person and the idea that is tested. It isn’t the scale of finance behind them. Bush was too nervous in front of the camera and had no idea how to handle the fact that his brother had been something of a controversial figure when he was president. Strategy and execution are more important than money.’

3. The Logo Matters.

One of Bush’s very first steps was to attempt to hide his Bushness. Instead, he released a logo that was garlanded with an exclamation point. Jeb! That exclamation point was everything Jeb Bush isn’t — except for perhaps slightly old-fashioned. The logo came from the past. The Republican electorate is worried about the future. The logo suggested tradition, when people were sick of politicians’ tradition of doing nothing while lining their own pockets. The logo shouted, whereas Jeb Bush twitched and bristled. Your branding should reflect you. Yes, like Donald Trump’s gold faucets.

See more on How Target Marketing using up to 200 variables Can Save Money & Boost Results.

For more frequent topical tit bits see PR Smith Marketing on facebook or just connect with me on twitter @pr_smith

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