Yep, That’s Anoroc

 by Deborah Loercher
August 17th, 2010

We took bets tonight on how late we’d be in Anoroc’s studio. We’re putting the final touches on a big brand re-invention. Someone just made a fortification run to MoJoe’s, food and beer always helps at this point. We’re almost to the printing stage. Just finished final proof reading. So printing and binding are next. As we crank up to print I have a spare moment so it is blog time.

It’s always such a team effort at Anoroc, literally everyone pitches in. We even just got a call from one of our AE’s  husbands, with an offer to drive everyone to the airport tomorrow.  That’s one of the many things I love about this company, how everyone feels it is their company, everyone’s commitment and dedication right down to our team’s families. Someone else is calling to make sure we have a dog sitter. I like to say we’re family here, and I believe we are. And that just feels good.  So maybe we’ll be here to midnight or til later, but it doesn’t matter. Beatles are playing loudly. The food has arrived, the dogs have been walked, and someone is laughing hysterically. Yep, that’s Anoroc.

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My last couple of blogs I’ve mentioned another one of my hereos, Bill Bernbach. Been quoting him a lot lately. And though many of us have read the letter below numerous times, I just really love what he expresses, it still rings so true. So with the risk of being repetitive here are words of wisdom, again.

Dear:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I’m worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people – writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique.

But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.

All this is not to say that technique is unimportant. Superior technical skill will man a good man better. But the danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability.

The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising.  The danger lies In the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

Respectfully,
Bill Bernbach

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Hospice Marketing Needs to Touch at the Core

 by Deborah Loercher
August 15th, 2010

I am sitting here with a great cup of coffee (Alex’s home brew, among his many talents he is a great coffee roaster), the dogs are milling around and it’s a beautiful sunny day. I can see the top of my Art Deco record player, yes the kind you have to crank, a couple of 78s are scattered about, “All Shook Up”, “Blueberry Hill” and “My Blue Heaven.” We played them Saturday night after arriving home from celebrating a dear friend’s 40th. He began as a client of Anoroc, but they often become life long friends. Life feels good.

This sounds like a personal diary entry, but it actually spurred from working this morning. It’s Saturday but that’s OK. I was reviewing two different concepts, each from a different Anoroc designer we’re preparing for an up coming client meeting. I love branding enough to give up my Saturday morning for it. But somehow these concepts struck such a deep cord with me I had to stop and write about it. I am actually delaying shoe shopping so if you know me, you know something must have struck deeply.

Casey’s concept moves from iconic images to photos. There is the very record player I had as a child, the kind that sits in a case you can close. It has a handle on top making it easy to take to a friend’s house for a sleep over. I played “Bang Goes Old Betsy” on it ‘til I wore it out. My dad bought both the record and the record player for me. He loved the song too. Rachel’s leads with an aged black and white photo of a young couple in a paddleboat, they are looking over their shoulders smiling at whom ever was holding the camera. There are old faded photos in an album I keep a bookcase in my family room just like it. It is of my aunt and uncle when they were young.

The concepts are for a Hospice agency. It’s hard to market hospice, there are a lot of complexities in the decision cycle. Anoroc has been researching and marketing hospice for close to two decades, tons of hospice decision cycle focus groups, secondary research, analyzing obstacles to choosing hospice care, so on. But when you can distil it down to a memory of falling in love on the lake and a little girl’s favorite record, obstacles can tumble into dust. As always, it’s about insight.

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being. One thing is unchangingly sure. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail,” Bill Bernbach.

I am proud of our 20-something designers and their artistry that touched me this morning. Even though it will inevitably result in a longing for the Louboutins left behind.

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What Healthcare Consumers Purchase

 by Deborah Loercher
August 14th, 2010

We are in the midst of creating a brand reinvention for a client. As you know, there are almost endless hours of research involved. This particular client occupies a very emotional healthcare segment. Amongst them and their competitors services are close to being the same, mainly that is due to regulations.  So the brand strategy becomes somewhat more intense because we’re fighting to differentiate. But that’s great, we like to fight hard, at Anoroc. But beginning this project with the goal to build a brand essence that allows my client to ‘own’ a compelling belief, must start with an in depth clarity about the intended target.

Though my client has several mid-size competitors they also face growing competition from national companies (one that recently sold for several billion dollars).  During the competitive analysis I expected to see pretty great branding from these ‘big boys’. But what began with an expectation to see great work, incredible consumer engagement strategies, in-tune social influence marketing, emotional branding, ended with me banging my head on my desk and moaning. OK, so I am sounding a little mean here, but it was that bad.

They forgot to listen to Bill. “You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen,” William Bernbach. The websites, collateral, every brand touch point was completely void of any indication these national companies had any understanding of who they were speaking to, what their best prospects believe, or how to motivate engagement.

Copy was written as if the reader was a test subject. For instance, an article on how to cope with the passing of our loved one during the holidays called the reader “the bereaved person”.  Brand imagery focused on the ‘service’ rather than outcome. Think of an oil change ad where the gloved mechanic is smiling over the open hood of the car. Now put him in a nurse’s uniform add harsh lighting, and throw his arm around grandpa who looks like he just ate road kill. Get the picture. And I’m not exaggerating. Believe me, Forrest would run.

What do we buy as healthcare consumers? We don’t buy the oil change. We buy the car speeding down the open road, in tune, running well and on it’s way to Willoughby.

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Depending of course on numerous client dynamics, we often, very often choose emotional branding over conventional branding when creating or re-inventing brands. I just personally believe in the power of storytelling to inspire and captivate. My opinion is not solely based on the fact that I am an admitted sap. It’s also based on close to two decades of calculating ROI ‘til my hair hurts. We’ve seen how impactful story telling has increased our client’s market share by 300%. In any book that is a home run. And we’ve hit those balls out of the park most of the time. Emotional branding’s strategic objective is to forge unshakable and meaningful bonds with consumers. Through these bonds brands become a significant part of a consumer’s life story, aspirations, self view and an important link in their social network. Do you know anyone who owns a Harley?

What I recently found interesting is the history of emotional branding and how to a very real degree a history that is repeating itself. Though the term “emotional branding” officially arrived in the 1990s, it has its roots in public relations campaigns of decades ago. Who can forget Edward L. Bernays’ 1923 Torches of Freedom march.

In the 1920’s, working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays sent a group of young models to march in the New York City parade. He then told the press that a group of women’s rights marchers would light “Torches of Freedom”. On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of the eager photographers. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’”. This helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public. Bernays actually sponsored my application into PRSA. That was a great day.

Jump forward to the 1930’s and the Great Depression. Job loss, savings loss, bankruptcy and displacement made citizens feel that corporations could not be trusted, were greed driven and needed supervision – sound familiar? Almost overnight they needed to find ways to regain trust and bring consumers back. Companies like Standard Oil (now Exxon) hired PR strategists to help them reposition themselves as “identifying with the average American vs Wall Street”. Standard Oil continued their foray into emotional branding when they hired Roy Stryker to work on their public relations documentary project from 1943 to 1950. In selecting photographers for the project Stryker looked for those who possessed an “insatiable curiosity, the kind that can get to the core of an assignment, the kind that can comprehend what a truck driver, or a farmer, or a driller or a housewife thinks and feels and translate those thoughts and feelings into pictures that can be similarly comprehended by anyone.” Emotional branding at its best.

Jump to today. Once again companies are shuffling to gain trust and position themselves as ‘one of us’. Here’s one of my favorite examples – Chrysler Group’s campaign for the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee (http://www.jeep.com/en/2011/grand_cherokee/sitelet/).  The ad focuses on the spirit and craftsmanship that once made the United States the country it was. The campaign, created by the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, also introduces a new tagline for the brand—“The things we make, make us.” How’s that for generating warm feelings of community? It even has cowboys for God’s sake.

I am going to end now as I need to go to Lowes so we can build something together. Think I’ll take the Audi instead of the BMW cause I prefer winning to loosing.

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Kudos to the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic last week announced the creation of a Center for Social Media. The goal of the center according to the Mayo Clinic press release is ‘to accelerate effective application of social media tools throughout Mayo Clinic and to spur broader and deeper engagement in social media by hospitals, medical professionals and patients to improve health globally.”

“Mayo Clinic believes individuals have the right and responsibility to advocate for their own health, and that it is our responsibility to help them use social media tools to get the best information, connect with providers and with each other, and inspire healthy choices,” explains Mayo Clinic president and CEO John Noseworthy, M.D. “Through this center we intend to lead the health care community in applying these revolutionary tools to spread knowledge and encourage collaboration among providers, improving health care quality everywhere.”

The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, a first-of-its-kind social media center focused on health care, builds on Mayo Clinic’s leadership among health care providers in adopting social media tools, which began with podcasting in 2005. Mayo Clinic has the most popular medical provider channel on YouTube and more than 60,000 “followers” on Twitter, as well as an active Facebook page with well over 20,000 connections. With its News Blog, Podcast Blog and Sharing Mayo Clinic, a blog that enables patients and employees to tell their Mayo Clinic stories, Mayo has been a pioneer in hospital blogging. MayoClinic.com, Mayo’s consumer health information site, also hosts a dozen blogs on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s to The Mayo Clinic Diet.

Mayo has also used social media tools for internal communications, beginning in 2008 with a blog to promote employee conversations relating to the organization’s strategic plan, and including innovative use of video and a hybrid “insider” newsletter/blog. This employee engagement contributes to Mayo Clinic being recognized among Fortune magazine’s “Best Places to Work.”

The center will accelerate adoption of social media for health-related purposes, starting at Mayo and then within health care more broadly. Through this work, Mayo Clinic looks to help improve health literacy, health care delivery and population health worldwide. And now with their newest push into social media, they can take it even further.

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The Doctors Finally Let Her Go Home

 by Deborah Loercher
July 6th, 2010

Last week Marilynn Marchione of the Associate Press wrote a story aptly titled: Americans Are Treated, And Overtreated, To Death.

The first line read: The doctors finally let Rosaria Vandenberg go home.

This is a pretty personal issue here at Anoroc, because it is a story we hear too often and it is why we crusade so passionately for our hospice clients. No family should have to experience what the Vandenberg’s experienced:

‘The doctors finally let Rosaria Vandenberg go home.

For the first time in months, she was able to touch her 2-year-old daughter who had been afraid of the tubes and machines in the hospital. The little girl climbed up onto her mother’s bed, surrounded by family photos, toys and the comfort of home. They shared one last tender moment together before Vandenberg slipped back into unconsciousness.

Vandenberg, 32, died the next day.’

Marchione’s story echoes so well what our clients preach every day- have the conversation about end of life care. Make choices now, while you still can.

“That precious time at home could have come sooner if the family had known how to talk about alternatives to aggressive treatment,” said Vandenberg’s sister-in-law, Alexandra Drane.

Instead, Vandenberg, a pharmacist in Franklin, Mass., had endured two surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation for an incurable brain tumor before she died in July 2004.

Too often we find ourselves sitting around the boardroom tables with our hospice clients talking about the patients ‘we lost’, patients that came to hospice too late. Sure our health division, Anoroc Health, is a strategic marketing company who works to make our hospice clients category leaders. But in all reality it is beyond that for us and it is beyond that for our clients. It is also about educating families that there is a choice in end of life. There is an alternative to aggressive treatment for incurable, terminal illness. I am happy Rosaria got to touch daughter once more, but we want the Rosarias of this world to have more, much more.

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Performics (www.performics.com), the performance marketing expert inside Publicis Groupe, recently released results from “S-Net (The Impact of Social Media),” a report from ROI Research Inc. (www.roiresearch.com) sponsored by Performics. This is quite an interesting study as it looks beyond usage and explores how social media permeates consumers’ lives. By that I mean how social media affects communication, shopping and other activities. The findings illustrate how social networks continue to drive changes in consumer behavior. Looking at how various segments of consumers use social networks in their daily lives, specifically with regard to the purchase process for different types of products and in relation to other media channels.

Most interesting to me was that the study of 3,000 U.S. social network users tackled not only general behaviors and platform preferences for social sites; but delved deeper into how social sites affect family and friend relationships and consumer attitudes towards brands and products.

Stats include:

  • Fifty percent of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to “like” a brand
  • Thirty-seven percent learned about a new product or service from a social networking site
  • Thirty-two percent of respondents have recommended a product/service/brand to friends via a social networking site
  • Thirty-two percent of Twitter users re-tweet content provided by a company or product
  • Eighty percent of respondents have an active Facebook account, and 23 percent of those without an active Facebook account plan to join in the next six months
  • Sixty-seven percent of respondents have reconnected with people through social networking sites that they never would have otherwise
  • Thirty-nine percent of Twitter users respond to other people’s tweets once a week or more
  • More than thirty percent of respondents access Facebook and/or Twitter from their mobile phone (through a browser or application) once a day or more.
  • Specific to Facebook, for example, nearly 90 percent of respondents said that at least some of the companies and/or products they are a fan of are doing a good job providing relevant content. More than a third said most or all of them were doing a good job.
  • More than 50% of participants identified social networks as the best way to communicate with family and friends.

Hello, word of mouth! Let me say that again. Hello, word of mouth!

“Users are not only satisfied, they want more, which is a good sign for marketers,” noted Scott Haiges, president of ROI Research. “Respondents expressed a strong desire to get more printable coupons [49 percent], notifications of sales and special deals [46 percent], and information about new products [35 percent] from companies or products on Facebook, and this rings truer in some industries more than others.”

“Social networks have made real and substantial changes in the lives of their users, in part by empowering them to more actively participate with brands and each other,” said Daina Middleton, CEO of Performics. “More than a third of all respondents reported using a search engine to further learn after seeing an ad on a social networking site, for example, and more than a third think social networking sites are good sources of information about companies and products.”

“Social networking has greatly contributed to the shift from strict consumerism to more lively, two-way participation between brands and everyday customers” added Middleton. “It’s a groundswell of technology-enabled word of mouth, and many of the brands involved in these active discussions are effectively satisfying their fans.” Amen to that, Sister!

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Who Wants To Friend A Brand

 by Deborah Loercher
May 6th, 2010

Just finished reading a great article by Tim Bradshaw of Financial Times, Who Wants To Friend A Brand (http://bit.ly/8YxE5V). In his article he points out how social media has fundamentally transformed marketing from a monologue to a dialogue. If you’ve read many of my blogs you’ll know this is what Anoroc refers to as moving away from ‘Sham Wowing’ and onto real communication.

I love what he says here: “When first faced with the prospect of marketing on social networks, many people ask a reasonable question: how many people want to be friends with a brand? The answer – surprisingly, perhaps – is: millions do, on a daily basis.”

And as experienced brand managers at Anoroc we know this is true.
Much of our brand research begins with focus groups that ask: “How do you want this brand/company to communicate with you?” And unsurprisingly enough we hear social media as a chosen platform most every time.

Bradshaw points out that more than 10m people each day become a “fan” of a brand on Facebook. The world’s largest social network – with well in excess of 400m members globally – plays host to more than 1.4m branded fan pages on Facebook. BrandZ Top 100 brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, along with other smaller brands outside the Top 100 such as Adidas (brand value or BV of $3.3bn in the latest MBO list), have each “befriended” millions of people.

“A lot of our best brand builders are also some of the best companies using social media,” says Joanna Seddon, chief executive of Millward Brown Optimor, which compiles the BrandZ ranking. “A lot of the leadership in social media is really centered in the top 100 brands.”

When Anoroc reviews ROI studies from our campaigns we’ve learned that Bradshaw is speaking Gospel here: “Social media has matured rapidly in recent years. Sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter offer scale and reach to rival Google – still the most dominant single site for online advertising – and many television channels. The best advertisers use social media alongside these traditional channels for a combination of brand-building, direct sales, customer service and PR. The worst simply ignore them, blissful only until they realise the complaints and accusations that disgruntled customers are telling other would-be consumers.”

“Social media have given consumers a voice to respond, as well as hundreds of channels through which to do so,” says Debbie Klein, joint chief executive of Engine, a UK-based agency group. “These websites have fundamentally transformed marketing from a monologue to a dialogue. Brands cannot hide.”

And brands that hide, may never be found.

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Just finished reading these two Special Reports via iHealthBeat (http://bit.ly/bKqv2S) on consumers increasingly turning to social media for healthcare information. Reports claim social media’s influence on consumer healthcare behavior is outpacing traditional channels.

Thursday, April 15, 2010
Consumers Increasingly Turning to Internet, Social Media for Health Care Information

Recent studies have found that consumers increasingly are turning to the Internet for health information.

In addition to health care Web sites, such as WebMD, consumers are turning to user-generated health content, such as physician and hospital rankings, blogs and chat groups.

While the Internet’s influence on consumers’ health care decisions is outpacing traditional channels, such as television, radio and print media, physicians still are the biggest influence on consumer health behavior, according to Monique Levy, senior director of research at Manhattan Research.

Google and Microsoft’s Bing recently refined their search engines to provide consumers with more credible and relevant information. (Kim, iHealthBeat, 4/15).

Friday, April 09, 2010
VA Taps Social Media Tools To Promote Health Benefits, Other Services

The Department of Veterans Affairs is turning to social media tools to improve communication with veterans and help them access health care and other benefits, the Washington Post reports.

Brandon Friedman — who previously served in the Army in Afghanistan and Iraq — is leading the department’s push to establish a presence on Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Friedman said veterans are interested in “a two-way conversation” with VA and platforms that allow them to offer feedback on the department’s services. He said that he has facilitated discussions on the agency’s Facebook page and that the department will launch a blog by the year’s end.

Friedman added that VA aims to promote transparency in its social media platforms to align with the Obama administration’s “open government” initiative (Erickson, Washington Post, 4/9).

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