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Are you in the market for a new car?

Good luck - you may have trouble finding a dealership wanting to sell you one.  Bear with me - this isn’t a post about cars, but about customer service.

This year, the UK’s retail motor industry welcomed, with outstretched arms, a new word into its lexicon - “scrappage”. In the middle of a thumping recession, the Government-funded scheme has helped the car business boost sales with a £2k sweetener for buyers agreeing to scrap their 10-year-old vehicle when buying a new one. Without it, the world of the motor trader in 2009 would have been a very different one.

A world without scrappage was depicted in a recent speech by Joe Greenwell, Ford’s UK chairman and president of the Society of Manufacturers and Motor Traders at its recent annual dinner. He said: “Without scrappage, this year’s total registrations would have been less than 1.7m. Against a high of nearly 2.6 million units in 2003, current expectations are for car registrations to fall to 1.8m in 2010. There is no doubt that..underlying demand remains weak.”

And this is the point. At a time like now, every customer counts.

It was Chris Brogan’s recent blog post on frustration with bricks and mortar retail that came to mind on a weekend trip to several high end car dealerships from which I came away convinced that some dealerships don’t want to sell cars.

First up - VW: we entered an empty showroom where the only person keen to talk was the receptionist. A salesman just about managed to grab some brochures but the car we wanted to see was “being used by a colleague over the weekend”. That’s fine, but did he want to arrange a viewing? No.

Next, BMW: we were sitting ducks, asking to be sold the benefits of a particular model. The salesman - not looking terribly busy - said: “I’ll get you a brochure. It’s all in there.” What about the boot space? The car battery was flat so the boot wouldn’t open. Now there was a veritable crowd of customers awaiting the grand boot opening. Eventually the lid was lifted and off the salesman skipped: “Leave it up, won’t you,” he chirped.

Lastly, Mercedes: best of the lot, but not great. We did get invited to sit down, but for a rather lacklustre chat about the car in question and promises about the great vehicles coming out of that manufacturer in the next couple of years.

For an industry facing a steep incline next year with a spluttering engine, it’s a worrying picture of customer interaction.

One man who knows a bit about car sales is one Derek Clements (disclosure: my father) who spent more than 50 years in the car business and ended his career training dealership staff in customer care. He said: “Getting new customer enquiries is expensive and dealers have to make the most of every one. It’s vital that sales staff make people truly welcome, comfortable and unthreatened before talking to them about what the customer wants or needs and matching that with the features and benefits of a car.

“In other words, make the customer feel important, listen to what they’re saying and start to build their confidence in dealing with you.”

With all this in mind, I asked Letty - a woman of advancing years and 10 years on the local Tesco checkout - what she felt customer service was all about and she said: “It’s just about being friendly. People seem so detached from each other these days and it costs nothing to smile.”

Listen to Letty - you could do much worse.

A quiet revolution started this week in the small Yorkshire town of Whitby.

The Whitby Gazette became one of three newspapers from the Johnson Press stable to start charging for content. Readers of the Gazette as well as Northumberland Gazette and Southern Reporter now have to pay £5 for a three-month subscription - or 40p a week.

While it has been Rupert Murdoch and his News International titles that have caught the headlines about when they will charge for access, it is regional newspaper publisher Johnson that has taken the first bold step.

What is interesting is that this move covers local rather than the national and international content that Murdoch’s titles provides.

Johnson’s chief executive John Fry said that he felt that local newspapers offered a “unique” service for which readers may be prepared to pay.

According to HoldtheFrontpage it has seen an internal memo circulated by senior managers in one Johnson division that says “Customers are used to paying for content in-paper and we are simply transferring this thinking online.”

Is this all a bit of reverse psychology with the ultimate aim to drive people back to buying newspapers? Michael Woolf writing in Vanity Fair last month hinted that Murdoch’s aim in charging for content is to drive people back to buying newspapers. Certainly an interesting thought from a newspaperman through and through.

The issue of charging form content also surfaced at the recent Society of Editors’ conference where the editor of the Newquest title the Worcester News, Kevin Ward felt that local newspapers had: “more opportunity to charge for the web” than their national counterparts. He added:  ”What we produce is niche. Nobody else sits in our courts every day. Nobody else scrutinises our public bodies.

One thing that is for sure is that newspaper groups will be watching the latest move from Johnson Press with interest.

Update: Tiger breaks his silence - is he right in what he says? 

Until now, Tiger Woods, the world’s number one golfer, highest paid sportsman and global icon, has built himself a wholesome, clean-living reputation.

His brand, the success of which is the result of his apparent honesty and integrity, has earned him a massive income from sponsorship deals with the likes of Nike, Gatorade and Gillette.

But unlike the bad boys of sport, whose antics are a regular fixture in the pages of the Sunday tabloids, the actions of a clean cut sporting hero seemingly brought low have far more mileage for the media.

With the recent car-to-hydrant incident, the world is becoming incredibly suspicious and wants answers. Perhaps a little unfair, and some may think his private life should be respected, but there’s a price to pay for being the world’s biggest sportsman.

What’s more, the entire situation has become almost embarrassing with not a trace of crisis management about it.

He appears, to his detriment, to be saying nothing, no explanation whatsoever, despite the rumours of an affair with a New York showclub hostess and his Swedish model wife who allegedly rescued him from his Cadillac SUV by smashing a window with a golf club.

Not only that but the opportunity to clear the air once and for all was laid on a plate at his very own golf tournament in California this week which he declined to attend, with no real explanation.

Tiger needs to be very wary, the Gillette curse is taking its hold. First Thierry Henry handballs in a World Cup play-off, Roger Federer crashes out of the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals and Tiger’s 2am dalliance with a fire hydrant remains a mystery.

US celebrity PR crisis expert, Gene Grabowski, recommends that those who find themselves in the eye of a media storm should take a leaf out of talk show host, David Letterman’s book and come clean early in a supposed scandal and take control of the information flow.

As the American’s would say; “Tiger, take a Mulligan.”

The social media arena has been dominated by the growth of Twitter, Facebook and other networking sites this year. As we’re nearing 2010, there’s chatter about how networks will evolve going forward and one of the key points I’ve seen in almost every trend forecast is filtering out the clutter.

According to Pingdom, Twitter is already closing in on 30 million tweets a day and the latest figures from Facebook reveal that over 45 million status updates are uploaded on the site each day. It’s no surprise that some users are starting to tune out and some still think that Twitter is a waste of time.

David Armano predicts on the Harvard Business Conversation Starter blog that social media will begin to look less social next year - i.e. we will try to get more value out of our networks through filtering messages (hiding from hyperactive updaters etc).

Twitter has already started tackling this with Twitter Lists, but it raises an interesting question - do we actually want to connect with people we don’t know? The majority of people using social media connect almost exclusively with people they already know in the real world. Or is it simply information overload and we need to be able to administer the incoming messages better?

Either way, it emphasises yet again that successful online PR does not equate to a large number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. As people start to sift through the clutter (and some will probably do this early next year as everyone jumps on the New Year’s resolutions bandwagon and pledge to tidy up their lives in general), brands which aren’t offering something really valuable are likely to be the first ones to fall off the list. Relevant and trusted content has always been important but more aggressive filters will mean it’s paramount to digital PR success next year.

How do you see 2010 panning out? Will it become more difficult for brands to reach consumers through social networks as people are increasingly being bombarded with marketing messages?

If Jesus turned water into wine, is it too much to ask for newspapers to turn soda (US: fizzy, sugared drinks) into the same stuff?

The analogy is the work of Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, and recent guest on a Harvard Business Ideacast. In this, he talks about how the future of the news media hangs on turning what he depicts as their homogeneous product (the “soda”) into something of greater quality (the “wine”). It also, he says, depends on news producers focusing more on people and what matters to them than the product itself.

Maybe this is a uniquely US perspective, as the various news sources that make up UK media - in one way or another - have worked to recognise their audience and generate the material it wants, whether that’s endless X-Factor coverage or sprawling, in-depth features on climate change. 

Sure, there have been price wars between newspapers, but that doesn’t stop the Sun, Mail, Guardian and Telegraph knowing what brings back their readers. In the case of the Telegraph, for one, I understand that page views online - an unequivocal measure of reader interest - are now used to influence the content of the printed edition.

The reinvention of news for the web is covered at length by Julio Romo, in his latest post following a recent CIPR Greater London Group meeting which heard from Nic Newman, the BBC’s Future Media and Technology Controller for Journalism and Digital Distribution and Laura Oliver, Editor for Journalism.co.uk.

As Newman is quoted as saying, journalism is undergoing a “quiet revolution” with the advent of social media and user generated content; this, in turn, has meant focusing less on breaking the news than on “verifying and curating” it.

Maybe this is the “wine” referred to by Haque.

Bottoms up!

pic: Jeffrey Barnard, former columnist at The Spectator and actor, Peter O’Toole, pose in The Coach and Horses pub, Soho.

At the risk of turning this into booze week on PR Media Blog, it’s hard to find a better example of “heritage marketing” than Jack Daniels.

Its sepia-photo-laden advertising, depicting a tradition of distilling going back more than a century imbues the brand with an authenticity and sense of quality that has stood the test of time. And, importantly for the brand maintaining its backstory, its founder was a real person called Jack Daniel. So far, so good, if you conveniently set aside its reputation as rock stars’ ruin for a moment.

But how crucial for a brand is having a genuine history? Or, conversely, how damaging is a hokey heritage?

A recent BBC story , investigated by its consumer affairs programme, “You and Yours”, revealed that the US fashion brand, Hollister - currently expanding its UK presence and which claims a history stretching back to 1922 - was in fact founded only in the Noughties.

If not suspicious enough, add to that a character called John Hollister - “adventurous traveller” and supposed company founder - branded “fictitious” by the BBC and a curt comment from the company itself when approached to explain its claims: “Due to our policies regarding press, we choose not to provide any comment on your questions.”

Despite the stubborn secrecy of the company and the aura of exposé in the BBC’s story, its vox pop of “teenage shoppers” found they really didn’t give a damn about Hollister’s historical fabrication.

Friend of PR Media Blog and marketing consultant at Goldsbrough Consulting, Matthew Goldsbrough, is phlegmatic about the issue: “When establishing a brand, it’s more about what it does and what it delivers rather than whether you can take it back through a lineage. Do you really care if there was, or wasn’t a “Mr.Volvo”?

He adds: “Any brand that underestimates the buyer is a fool. But I don’t think that a fake history matters greatly as the brand is not making a promise which it then breaks. At the younger end of the customer spectrum, people are much less reliant on complete provenance with a brand. Overall, the real test is ‘does it deliver?’”

Orson Welles once put together a film about the nature of authenticity called “F for Fake”. But for the modern shopper, is it more “C for couldn’t care less”?

Retro is big, there is certainly no denying that. Whether it is aviator sunglasses, leg warmers or a Casio digital watch, you don’t need Gok-Wan to tell you that the latest fashion was probably the latest fashion at some point in the past as well. This trend has also moved to food with the return of the likes of Monster Munch and Wispa.

Now ad execs have caught the bug with recent examples including Persil, Milky Way chocolate bars and Toys ‘R’ Us. It seems that in adland, retro is now, but why the resurgence?

Stephen Foley talked of this trend on American television earlier in the year on the Independent’s website. With regards to a McDonalds’ retro ad campaign, he comments: ‘It is meant to raise a familiar smile, a warm glow inside, the perfect antidote to the sub-prime nightmares and job-shearing chaos of the modern world’.

In the article Barnardo Revello, an editor at New York based post-production house Cosmo Street, comments: ‘It normally happens in times of economic trouble, when people reach for unifying values and marketers adopt an attitude of pulling together…when the economic difficulties give way to something better, then this style will no doubt give way to something with a bit more energy.”

Rune Gustafson, Chief Exec of Interbrand endorses these views and believes they hold just as true on this side of the pond: “In changing times people fall back on the brands they consumed earlier in their lives, when times were less uncertain. You could argue that the Seventies were hardly a golden age of security. But if you remember feeling secure and protected within the family from what was going on in the world, the past will certainly seem easier, more secure, safe. There’s certainly an element of escapism in all of this.”

So rather than there simply being a chronic lack of cash to develop new advertising creatives, ad execs are pandering to consumers desire to take comfort in something that is certain – the past. It is also rather convenient that retro ads cost nothing develop.

But in an age when the likes of Honda have been concentrating on producing technically astonishing and painfully cool ad campaigns, it is nice that something as simple as a cartoon with a catchy jingle can generate just as much buzz.

Of course there is a saturation point where people will begin to tire of the recycling of classic adverts, but until that point, we can all enjoy a bit of nostalgia and who knows, perhaps in 20 years we will see a Honda ad from the ‘noughties’ and revel in its simplicity and purity of approach.

Today’s guest blog comes from Kirsten Mortensen, a marketing communications strategist based in Rochester, N.Y. who - in the cause of investigating social media best practice - has found herself in the pub…

Many businesses today are wondering whether to invest in social media.

Others are pretty sure they need social media-but haven’t quite figured out how to do it.

And then you have people like Joe McBane, who have taken to social media so naturally it’s become a seamless extension of his business.

Granted, McBane is in the hospitality industry-and if any industry is ready-made for social media, this would be it.

McBane owns the Tap & Mallet, a two-year-old pub in Rochester, New York.

Rochester, if you’re unfamiliar, is a community in the United States “rust belt” best known as the hometown of the iconic film company, Eastman Kodak. McBane himself, however, isn’t a Rochester native. He’s a Sheffield, UK transplant who first put down roots as bar manager at The Old Toad, Rochester’s studied version of the authentic British pub. His Tap & Mallet is something altogether different, however: more an American-style neighborhood bar-but with a decidedly upscale and 21^st century focus on craft beers.

McBane’s pub also happens to appeal to a demographic perfectly suited to a social media-based marketing strategy. His customers are students and young professionals-exactly the people who tend to have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, who follow blogs and reach for Google, not the phone book, when they’re planning their weekends.

And McBane is a natural marketer. He loves his business and loves telling people about it.

These caveats notwithstanding, McBane’s experience proves that social media can pay off richly for business owners who take the time to use it.

His strategy is multi-pronged. He has a website, where he publishes his beer and food menus. Because Tap & Mallet’s selection of draft beers changes continually, the site gives customers an easy way to check what’s on tap.

His website also hosts a blog, where McBane posts short articles on the pub and on any topic that strikes his fancy-any topic, that is, that relates back to beer. The blog serves two purposes. It lets customers stay in touch with McBane and his pub. And it serves up a growing collection of beer-related content. That, in turn, contributes to Tap & Mallet’s respectable Google rank: if you search for “beer + Rochester New York”, the pub’s home page appears within the first five or six results.

But it’s Twitter where McBane most clearly demonstrates the power of social media. A year after opening his Twitter account, McBane has cultivated over 500 followers. He’s also recently launched a Tap & Mallet iPhone app that followers can use to check the pub’s menu and even place orders if they want.

Sometimes his tweets are links to web articles about craft beers. (He uses hash tags on terms like “craft beer” and “Rochester” to help people find his tweets via the software’s search function.)

For the majority of his tweets, however, McBane has one goal in mind: give followers an excuse to drop by for a pint. His selection of draft beers is continually rotating, for instance. So McBane tweets when new beers go on tap. He tweets updates when he’s holding an event-a beer social or a pig roast or a tasting. And he tweets Twitter-only specials.

“People like the exclusivity,” he says.

McBane, for his part, likes the fact that it’s marketing with a clear and tangible effect. He’ll broadcast a secret word that customers can use to get a special price-and within an hour or two, fifteen or twenty people will show up.

It’s marketing with measurable results.

But there’s more to it than that. Social media allows McBane to extend Tap & Mallet into the virtual world. “We’re a beer and food community,” he says-and adds that it’s also a business where you “live or die” on your regulars. By making it easy to stay in touch with his customers, social media helps ensure Tap & Mallet regulars return. Regularly.

And it costs McBane pennies-a couple minutes of phone time, his web hosting fees. Nor does he invest huge amounts of time-maybe 20 minutes a day, on average. Convenience, in fact, is a priority. He recently installed a Facebook app so he can update his Facebook page from his phone. His website beer menu doubles as his on-site beer menu-when he needs new copies of the print menu, he prints them out from the site. That way he only needs to update the menu in one place.

McBane hasn’t abandoned conventional marketing altogether. He generally has one print ad running at any given time in one of Rochester’s local weeklies. That, no doubt, helps him reach people who wouldn’t find him on Twitter or Facebook.

But print is a static media, and McBane understands the lure of variety. Even outside the sphere of social media, he gravitates toward marketing ideas that build on the same kind of novelty afforded by a constantly changing beer menu. His pub doubles as a gallery space for local artists, for instance. This generates good will in the local arts community (most artists sell at least one or two pieces per show). It gives customers something to talk about. But equally important, it ensures that the pub walls are periodically refreshed. “You hang pictures on your wall in your house, and after awhile, you don’t see them any more,” he says. “It’s the same here, for our regulars.” Swapping out the art every few months injects a bit of proverbial spice into the pub’s atmosphere.

McBane also recently purchased a 1956 Austin Princess limousine on EBay. (You can see pictures of him towing it to Rochester from New Hampshire ) “It needs some mechanical work and a re-spray,” he says-a paint job that will include adding the Tap & Mallet logo. “I’ll have it on the road next summer.”

At first glance, using an antique car as a marketing tool might seem a world apart from Twitter.

But it’s not. For McBane, a cool old car is all about personality-or perhaps more precisely personableness: a means of connecting, on a personal level, with customers.

And it works. “We grew our business during a recession,” he says. How much? “I would have been happy with this rate of growth in any economy.”

Yes, social media takes a bit of creative flair. And yes, it helps when your target market is social media-savvy. But as Joe McBane has found, for a relatively small investment of time and money, tools like blogging and Twitter and Facebook can seed genuine word-of-mouth-and deliver a measurable benefit to a business’ bottom line.

It’s not usual for PR Media Blog to ”big up” its benificent parent, Staniforth , but if you would indulge us for a moment…

This week, at the North West CIPR Pride Awards, the agency scooped the Best Use of Photography awards for its work supporting the launch of the Fibre Foundation.

In short, we persuaded cricketer and Strictly Come Dancing alumnus, Mark Ramprakash, not only to undress but be anatomically decorated to show the vital organs that benefit from a fibre-rich diet.

As with any good picture, it tells a thousand words; and this went down well with the national media.

The CIPR judges said: “This campaign was built on outstanding use of photography to communicate messages about public health. The use of cricket player, Mark Ramprakash, added celebrity endorsement, but the creative genius was to use body paint in a way to create very striking visual images. The campaign is memorable and reaches the client’s core target publics.”

Now you can get on with eating your Bran Flakes.

Who still hates social media?

Some have been vocal in suggesting that the principles are right but the execution is worth only throwing out and replacing with “something real”.

In Jeremiah Owyang’s recent blog post following the Forbes CMO summit in Florida, the former Forrester analyst and now strategist for the Altimeter Group claimed that this group of chief marketing officers had “elevated” the social media discussion.  Despite the prospect of shrinking marketing spend, he says, the marketeers had seen opportunities to “innovate with inexpensive channels” and not a moment too soon, as they were facing something new: a loss of power to the empowered consumer.

Owyang points out that social media in particular was “on the lips of nearly everyone”, with a focus on how it could apply to changes in influence, reputation management and be integrated with existing activity.  One example he cites from the companies represented at the event is that of Ritz-Carlton hotels, whose hotel managers apparently review online chatter about their hotel before doing anything else of a morning.

Overall, 70% of CMOs polled by Forbes said they’d be doing more work in social media next year, now comfortable that it offers real value, though measurement was still in its infancy.

So how does the picture look in the UK?  There is some caution but big organsiations have been listening and in some cases joining the conversations too.   Retail is one sector where business understands the need for customer dialogue.  It was more of an old fashioned PR stunt but Debenhams used social media to good effect with a twitter assistants day in September.   Habitat was an early adopter but got off to a false start with the hashtags debacle, in which they attempted to piggyback serious stories like the Iran election protests in order to flog lampshades.  ASDA’s new Aisle Spy and Your ASDA blogs are examples of a much more considered approach to long term engagement.

Twelve months ago the attitude of big business to social media ranged from cautious interest to total disregard.  Now, in the UK too, the sound of consumer chatter is gaining an audience in the board room.