Marketing Talk

Today I had the pleasure of taking part in our PhD day — a get-together of all the students who have embarked on the intellectual marathon of getting a doctorate at the Open University Business School. The PhD day is a bit like one of the water stations where the weary runners are handed refreshments by enthusiastic volunteers. Today’s volunteers included Professor Nina Reynolds from Southampton with a very useful talk on how the various components of a research project are like a  jigsaw puzzle (i.e. they should  fit, rather than be forced together), my colleague Dr Andrew Lindridge on ethical problems presented by sensitive research topics (some pretty hair-raising stories there), and my humble self on the the power of the poster. Click the link to see my slides.

Poster presentation is a skill that budding researchers need to master to cut it in the world of academic conferences. Most of the stuff that’s been written on the subject is in medical or nursing journals. But posters are gaining popularity in business subjects as a way of disseminating research quickly and simply.

Most of my audience today had just been on a course about how to design and create posters and some  had actually produced entries for a poster competition to be judged on the day. Looking at the display I knew there wasn’ t much I could teach them about production, but the focus of my talk was on what posters are good at.

We all know, more or less, what posters are. Their simplicity is part of their strength. According to Wittich and Schuller, writing in the 1970s about educational media, they can be defined as a ‘visual combination of bold design, colour and message intended to catch and hold the attention of the passer-by long enough to implant or reinforce a significant idea in his or her mind’. You can see already that there is a strong overlap between what advertisers might want a poster to do, and what you might want your poster to do at an academic conference.

Asked what a poster might mean for a researcher, my audience came up with a list that included: summary, prop for talking, shop window, abstract and positive nightmare. I was pleased with that list because it conveyed the sense of how a poster sparks personal interaction between researcher and audience, and also how much planning and work is involved in producing one that’s effective and impactful.

First you need to decide the overall format of your poster. If you are presenting at a conference there may be instructions to follow. Or there may be a ‘normal’ approach for your subject area. But given the potential of a poster for getting your name known, you may want to defy convention and make a splash. It all depends on your objectives — what do you want the poster to do?

You should never underestimate the power of visual impact. A study of posters at medical science conferences concluded in 2011 that even indifferent science was seen as groundbreaking if it was expressed in a visually stunning poster. There are plenty of templates and ‘how to’ guides on the web to help you come up with something suitably amazing, using familiar packages like PowerPoint or Publisher.

But what about your role as presenter? Quite apart from what’s  pinned or velcroed to the display stand, you need a persuasive script. The average visit to a poster is between two and four minutes according to that 2011 study cited earlier. So you need to convey your message superfast. Script an ‘elevator pitch’ about your research. This is a statement between 30 seconds and two minutes long ( apparently the range of time people spend in lifts) which conveys who you are, what you’re doing, and why it’s so interesting and important to your audience. Harvard Business School has a nice formula with career openings in mind, but it can easily be adapted to academic earbending.

Preparing answers to likely questions will save time, and make you more confident. Handouts (not necessarily miniature reproductions of the poster but key points with your contact details) are an excellent idea. As is having some kind of freebie on hand to attract visitors. Even the simple offer of a sweet can stop a visitor in their tracks, and (if sufficiently chewy) silence them long enough to listen to your pitch uninterrupted.

I mentioned common ground between advertisers and academics when it comes to posters. Advertising research from Holland in 2009 makes a number of interesting points. Using a tachistoscope (a device which can show split-second images of posters or other material) researchers established that consumers needed less viewing time to be able to recall posters which had clear branding and novel information, short headlines, minimal clutter, photographs and predominantly blue colour schemes. They took longer to absorb messages from posters with a lot of text, complex images, humour, pictures of women, information about price and red colour schemes. I’m baffled about the women and the colour scheme (my wife will not be surprised to hear that). But it’s clear that the more complex the message, the more difficulty people have getting it. Might seem obvious but it’s good to know there is scientific evidence for the old adage of keep it simple when it comes to posters — academic or otherwise.

We live in a ‘presentation culture’ where if you can’t fit something on a screen in three bullet points and a piece of clip art, it’s hardly worth saying. As a result large slices of our working lives are spent in darkened rooms being subjected to near-death-by-powerpoint experiences by people telling us what they are going to tell us, telling us, then telling us what they have just told us, whether or not they had anything to say in the first place.

Now, where was I?

Arch-exponents of the visual aid congregate on the web at SlideShare, an invaluable site where you can upload and share your latest ‘deck’ (of slides) with your peers. It’s a handy stop for anyone keen to get a quick briefing on the ubertrendy in marketing and technology, and you can learn a lot from seeing how other people prepare their slides (both good and bad!).

SlideShare has just issued its ‘Zeitgeist’ summary for 2011, picking out key developments in presentation culture across the globe. The first thing to note is that, with 80% of all material uploaded from USA and Europe, planet SlideShare is heavily Western. Asia is bubbling under at 19%, but Africa still only accounts for 1% of content.

Asia leads the world in presentation length, however, with an average of 29 slides from Japanese contributors, followed closely by China with 27. The good news for fidgety exporters is that Japanese presentations are shrinking — down from a yawntastic average 42 slides in 2010. Spain appears to be the tersest nation — with an average of 20 slides per deck.

Bells and whistles are on the increase everywhere if file size is anything to go by. The most popular presentations (those rated highest by peers) weigh in at a mailbox-busting 9.2mb average (from 7.9mb in 2010). As you might expect from a previous post on Marketing Talk, men use more slides than women — 26 vs 22 as a rule.

So, what are all these presentations actually about? To help you find what you are looking for, their creators use tags — labels which identify content. The most popular this year, as last, is ‘business’, with ‘marketing’ and ‘design’ occupying second and third slots. Last year it was ‘markets’ and ‘research’. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the fact that SlideShare is all about sharing stuff on the web, the most frequently-named companies are Twitter and Facebook (between them counting for about 70% of all references to business) with Google in third place at 20%. Apple only manages about 4% — a worrying trend perhaps?

To conclude, if you want to be a power in the land of powerpoint you might want to take note of the following:

The charity trade paper Third Sector has just reported that the number of charity shops in the UK has shot up by almost a third since 2008 to just over nine thousand according to figures from a retail information company. Leading the field is Age UK with 876 shops (the number boosted, no doubt, by the fact that it includes outlets which respectively belonged to Age Concern and Help the Aged before they merged in 2009). Close behind is Oxfam, with about 700. Neck and neck for third place are the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK with about 500 apiece.

We have Oxfam to thank for charity shops as we now know them. Although the Salvation Army was selling cheap second-hand clothes to the urban poor in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was Oxfam who pioneered the idea of fundraising through selling donated goods from a shop, opening their first branch in Oxford’s Broad Street in 1947. It’s still going strong. Oxfam has also led the way in subsequent developments like specialist shops dealing with books, furniture and music, though most of its competitors seem to prefer a mixed bag of merchandise. The biggest line by far is women’s clothes, followed by books. The latter are important in attracting the elusive male shopper which makes for a more varied clientele than most other retail outlets in these days of niche marketing.

Why the sudden boom in numbers, though? Is it because we’re more frugal dressers and readers since the global downturn? Or perhaps it’s greenness rather than meanness that is making us recycle our own stuff through charity shops, and give other people’s cast-offs a new lease of life? There’s also what’s going on in town centres of course. I suspect that many new charity shops are opening simply to fill all those premises standing empty on the high street. Their previous occupants have fled out of town, where shopper parking is not seen as the quasi-criminal offence it has become in most town centres. But I also think that charity shops themselves offer something that mainstream retailers lack. Basically they are a lot more fun. The volunteers behind the counter in my local hospice shop are always ready for a chat, and appear to be enjoying themselves (even when having a good moan!). The merchandise is like an aladdin’s cave of the vagaries of taste — sometimes good, and sometimes wonderfully bad. It’s amazing what people have had in their houses. Shopping there is like being licensed to look through other people’s wardrobes, book shelves, record collections and kitchen drawers. It’s a bit like being a very virtuous burglar (with the exception that burglars get even better discount).

A notable trend amongst the larger charities (who run something like three out of four charity shops) is their increasing attention to professional retailing design, layout and efficiency. That’s a welcome development if it means that donations can be turned into money more effectively (for example by getting donors to fill out Gift Aid forms so that the sale value of their gifts is enhanced. UK law treats such donations as if they were cash, which also explains why VAT does not apply to sales of donated goods). But it would be a shame if charity shops became obsessed with mainstream retailing practice. Some of the more sophisticated fundraising operations have attracted disgruntled comment from their commercial neighbours who don’t benefit from an 80% reduction in business rates as do charities and can’t persuade shopworkers to work for nothing (well, not yet). Actually, most major charities employ paid staff as shop and area managers, and many have moved into fresh areas of merchandise such as new rather than donated goods. But what makes them special, whether the big hitters like Age UK, or the local minnows like my hospice, is their mission to support good causes (not only financially but also through disseminating information and publicity). This is something that commercial retailers are beginning to learn from (even as some of them complain about the favoured status of charity shops). Increasingly they too are beginning to compete on values alongside value for money.

If you want to know more about retailing check out the popular new Open University Business School module An introduction to retail management and marketing. Or if you are more focused on fundraising through shops and other methods, have a look at Winning resources and support, a perenially popular choice with people working with good causes.

Ofcom have just published the latest in a series of annual reports on how children (5 – 15) use and think about TV and online media, and how their parents and carers attempt to police it. The picture that emerges is of digital media playing an increasingly important part in the school and social lives of children, while their parents (half of whom admit their kids know more about the internet than they do) make a gallant attempt to keep up.

Particularly striking is the fact that, for the first time since the annual studies began in 2006, 12 – 15 year-olds have declared that they would miss their mobile phones and the internet more than television. Even so, TV remains the main media time-sponge amongst 5 – 15 year olds overall, at an average of 17 and a half hours a week – two hours up on 2007. Second-choice media activity varies, with younger children preferring computer games, while older children browse, do homework, and Facebook. 12- 15 year olds are now online for the best part of 16 hours a week.

While Google is the most used website across the group as a whole, social networking becomes increasingly popular the older the child. Membership of sites such as Facebook at 54% is about the same amongst 8 – 15 year olds as it is amongst adults in general. For 12 – 15 year olds, it’s a passion – three in four being active users. Life in the digital playground is not without its negative side, naturally. Malicious gossip, embarrassing photographs, impersonation, being picked on – it’s not all sweetness and light online. One in five 12 – 15 year-olds reported personal experience of this kind of thing in the past 12 months.

In spite of the fact that a minority of respondents admitted to risky behaviour (e.g. divulging their profile to contacts they had only met online) 88% of 5 – 15 year olds were confident they know how to stay safe. Their parents, as a rule, concurred with this view. 79% pointed out that staying safe online was something their children learned to do at school, and most of them had clear rules about their children’s use of TV and media – including an increase in the direct supervision of such use amongst some parents. The report concluded, however, that many parents could do more to use the technical controls available to them (such as internet filters and PIN controls for TV) alongside discussing do’s and don’ts with their children. They might have to learn more about the internet first, of course…

What does all this mean for marketing? In spite of the growth of online as an advertising medium, concerns about television still dominate much of the controversy about marketing to children, as I have discussed elsewhere. The increasing amount of commercial presence online, not only in terms of content but also in how that content gets filtered and made available to users, affects not only adults but, increasingly, children. The 2011 Ofcom report reveals that parents are concerned about their children’s exposure to inappropriate content and behaviour on television and digital media. Perhaps we should be doing more to ensure that parents and children can also recognise and respond appropriately to commercial activity online?

I’m very pleased to be blogging the news that I was lucky enough to receive the Journal of Social Marketing award for Best Paper at the recent 10th International Colloquium on Arts, Heritage, Non-profit and Social Marketing, held at Leeds Business School on 7th September. This event, the length of whose title is proportional to its excellence, is an annual shindig for academics from all over the world to share their work in progress. It’s always a fascinating occasion. Amongst other things, this year’s Colloquium featured work on selling theatre to sheep farmers, what the Big Society means for marketing, and how to promote road safety to the Norwegians.

In a Colloquium you stand up for 20 minutes, explain what you are investigating and how, and what you’ve found out so far. Then your audience pitch in with their reactions so you get a sense of how much (if any) sense you’ve been making. They have to be constructive because more than likely they’re on next. It’s hard work, fun, friendly and a useful step towards getting an article in print (see my previous post Publish or Perish). And if you are very lucky, now and then there are prizes to be had! (Mine is a year’s online subscription to the Journal of Social Marketing by the way, and a very nice framed certificate).

My certificate (printed on recycled paper natch.)

Getting a catchy title is always a good start. Try ‘Fixing the menvironment and healing the shecology: a gendered approach to pro-environmental social marketing’. Well, the judges liked it!

The point of the paper is that men and women may well talk about environmental issues in different ways. If this is the case, it makes sense to aim separate marketng messages reflecting these differences at men and at women in order to encourage them to adopt greener behaviour. I got the idea for this when I was doing a project last year with my colleague Dr Anne Smith from ISM-Open (the Open University’s end of the Institute for Social Marketing which we jointly host with the University of Stirling). We were working with a number of organisations to find ways in which employees themselves could devise and then implement greener working practices, eventually ‘marketing’ them to their colleagues. We spent a lot of time talking to people in focus groups. I couldn’t help noticing that the men were talking differently from the women somehow but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Reading around the subject I came across the work of the American linguist, Deborah Tannen. As long ago as 1990 she wrote the kind of book that most academics can only dream of — a best-seller that got her work in front of a mass readership, and catapulted her into a whirlwind tour of chat shows and radio interviews. The book was called ‘You Just Don’t Understand’, and the big idea behind it was that men and women are two separate cultures when it comes to communication. Do I see you nod your head? She claimed, convincingly enough for the book to go into several new editions, and to spawn a multitude of further research publications, that in order to avoid the kind of conflicts and breakdowns that are all too common a part of daily life, we need to adjust our communicative styles to take such differences into account.

Men are more competitive than women, she argues (forgive me Professor Tannen if you are reading this. I freely confess I am oversimplifying your excellent work). They’ll do anything to avoid being ‘pushed around’, including talking in a way which emphasises their technnical expertise (even if it is based on very slim credentials). Women on the other hand are more conciliatory. They will do anything to avoid being ‘pushed out’, including talking in a way which keeps relationships intact and values emotion.

Taking this theoretical framework to the conversations I had recorded in my focus groups, how did the evidence stack up? Sure enough, there were the men, jockeying for position in the talk, interrupting, disagreeing, coming up with technology-inspired solutions to global warming, and generally having a great time rubbishing each other. OK they weren’t all like that, but there was enough evidence for me to recognise many of the patterns Professor Tannen had revealed. The women, particularly if there were no men around to talk across them, were more given to nostalgia, worrying about how the environment was just part of the problem of society becoming less connected and generally agreeing that if we all did our bit, perhaps there’d be some hope of a greener future. Again, I’m oversimplifying vastly, but you get the general drift.

There is of course more to it than that. We speak as we do for many reasons, which interact with gender. But gender is important — and in recent decades it’s become a hot topic as scholars such as Judith Butler have questioned the apparently ‘given’ nature of gender, revealing the importance of social norms in what we take for granted as male and female. She argues that gender is something we ‘perform’ — so perhaps all that environmental talk I was listening to is part of a performance, as each speaker acts out a part based on what they consider appropriate to their image of themselves as male or female, or any variation thereof?

What might this mean for social marketers keen to find the most relevant and effective ways of communicating pro-environmental messages? Is the best idea to approach men and women with different stories? Might advertising work, for example, with male characters shown as solving environmental problems, ‘fixers’ using technology to triumph over the competition provided by global warming? Women, on the other hand, might be potrayed as directly involved in ‘healing’ an ecology of which they feel a part. A possible scenario might be a woman growing organic vegetables, a symbol of personal activity to reunite ‘natural’ processes of nurture and nutrition for family and friends. Or should we rethink this all, and wonder how we might find ways of offering changed environmental behaviour as ‘material’ somehow for ‘performing’ gender as individuals see fit?

What do you think?

First of all, welcome back to Marketing Talk! After a summer break we are back in business with yet more musings on the marketing milieu. (Well actually my professor has just accused me of being a lapsed blogger, which is worse than being a lapsed Catholic, as you can’t get absolution for Portal sin). So here I am again, clutching a firm purpose of amendment.

Happily, comment moderation is on (so you don’t have to read them), but the blogging lacuna has not deterred the many unknown admirers who praise my posts in superlative but grammatically-incoherent comments, promising me great things should I buy their electronics, marry their brides-in-waiting or apply their potions. Please people, enough! I’m happy as I am. Really.

Watercooler moment?

Now, to the subject of this post. We have just had notification of the final withdrawal of watercoolers throughout the university. It’s the end of an era. When I first got here they were generously dotted throughout the Business School in a canny attempt at social engineering. I think the idea was to unite knots of disparate colleagues in earnest debate around each watercooler about last night’s TV, recent advances in financial accounting, or who’d left their lights on in the South car park. But the only gatherings I can remember were actually impromptu seminars on which button was for the cold water, and where to put your cup to prevent a jet of refreshment hitting the carpet. The watercooler as social hub never really caught on.

The real epicentre of office socialisation then, as now, was the ‘coffee dock’ — a room down the corridor equipped with sink, wall-mounted boiler for hot drinks, microwave, fridge and — inexplicably but delightfully — a dishwasher. This is where you bump into people, steal their milk, and generally tune into what’s going on. Canny internal marketers stick their posters here, cunning managers visit in search of hard-to-find colleagues, indigent postgrads warm their meagre lunches here. So far no-one to my knowledge has worked out the dishwasher.

Coffee docks are fiercely territorial, used only by inhabitants of the relevant corridoor or wing. Cups and utensils are ranged proprietorially around the kitchen sink; clearly labelled milk bottles cram the fridge. Watercoolers are more universal somehow. They don’t belong to anyone. While they were here they were everywhere but nowhere in particular. Their passing has gone largely unremarked and unmourned. We are more of a ‘kitchen-sink’ than a ‘water cooler’ culture. And I suspect so are most other institutions.

The writing on the wall for our watercoolers dates from 2010 when the company which supplied them went into administration. Since then they have been maintained by the university, but the supply of parts has dried up and in the current financial climate the mains water tap seems preferable as a source of corporation pop. The failure of that company tells us something about social trends relevant to marketing. People have so many options to communicate nowadays (text, phone, email, even blogs) that the idea of hanging around a watercooler to do so seems a bit redundant. We also have fewer topics of common knowledge and interest. Apart from major sporting occasions and royal weddings we hardly ever all watch the same stuff on television, thus removing one mainstay of watercooler encounters.

This kind of diversity (of media, experience and interest) is a headache for 21st century marketers. Long gone are the days when they could rely on targeting broad segments of the population with more or less the same marketing approach. Many contemporary marketers think in terms of groups of consumers as ‘tribes’, united — often fleetingly — by certain habits and enthusiasms, just as they are divided by other characteristics such as age and geography. Rethinking how you see your customers so that you understand them in their own terms rather than the convenient ones you would prefer to impose is not easy, but should be at the heart of successful marketing. While watercoolers, with their universal pretensions to refreshment, are drying up, the coffee dock, with its tribal following, is here to stay. Hello kitchen sink marketing.

Last week I manned (personned? personified?) a trade stand for the Open University at a big event aimed at charities and voluntary organisations.

There were inspiring keynote sessions, multiple track workshops, surgeries and presentations, a blogging zone (hello there!) and a lady giving Indian head massages. The delegates (a record number according to the organisers) were to mill around the exhibition area between (or perhaps even during) sessions, engaging in meaningful interactions with myself and another two dozen or so hopeful purveyors of products and services to the third sector.

So what happened? Not much actually. Interested enquirers, or even innocent passers by, were thin on the ground. They can’t all have been in the blogging zone surely? At coffee and meal breaks the exhibition hall packed out (cunningly that’s where the food was) but everyone seemed more interested in networking, making phone calls and eating than in meaningful interaction with the likes of me.

Going for a wander after the lunchtime rush to see how others were faring, I got the impression that everyone else was feeling a bit lonely too. We jealously derided the promotions company who had got a chocolate fountain and what looked like champagne cocktails to entice browsers. We loyally admired each other’s freebies (squeezy stress-relief balls very popular this year, with exhibitors at least). We even entered each other’s prize draws. Please, please, please let me win that iPad! Other exhibitors kindly admired my leaflets (being the high-minded OU, that was it on freebies from stand 34!). Little did they suspect I was planting a seed of educational desire in their subconscious minds which will surely bloom years hence…

Silence is turtle-shaped

The guys opposite were enterprising souls. Advised on likely numbers by the organisers, they brought along industrial quantities of Haribo sweets. As they demonstrated several times, accepting one of these ultrachewy items means you have to listen to whatever someone is telling you about their product as you are too busy trying to dislodge it from your teeth to say anything yourself. Great idea, but watch out for about seventy quid’s worth of unused chewy sweets on eBay soon.

My Six Top Tips for exhibitionists everywhere as a result of this experience are:

have something to start a conversation with — could be Haribo, or any number of small giveaways, but once you give someone something it’s difficult for them not to spend at least some time talking with you. A branded item with a contact number or website is ideal — but make sure you give it actively or the opportunity for interaction passes.

think quality not quantity — OK, we could have done with more footfall, but of the people I talked to, the vast majority sounded genuinely interested in taking things further in due course

see it as the start of a relationship. You can’t evaluate presence at an exhibition from immediate sales, but by the leads it generates. So have a follow-up form where you can record contact details and an exact idea of what it is that your visitor is looking for.

stand up (sitting down on an exhibition stand disconnects you from visitor level). Tiring, but essential.

look your visitor (or prospective visitor) in the eye and ask how they are feeling today. Works for those enthusiastic young people with tabards and clipboards, so why not you?

most importantly, listen.

Oh, and make sure whatever event you are exhibiting at does not comprise too much of a distraction from your stand.

Caramel Bunny, the langorously laid-back lapin whose motto has been ‘take it easy’ since the 1980s has suddenly gone a bit Type A. Cadbury’s astutely-planned new poster and press campaign has her urging us to get our bob-tailed rears in gear lest we miss the chance of bagging her and her chocolate twin in a seasonal cellophane two-pack.

No pen on that crowded dressing table, so the message to get nippy is in lippy.

What’s the hurry? The time of year, basically. This is known as seasonal marketing, particularly important for confectionery manufacturers (but also a mainstay of retailers — as outlined in a previous blog).

There, ringed on Ms Bunny’s wall calendar is April 24th, Easter Sunday — cue for chocoholics everywhere to abandon Lenten abstention and dive back into the brown stuff big time.

I’ve never quite understood the connection between Easter and chocolate. Yes, eggs are a sign of new life — and feature in Christian iconography as a symbol of divine perfection, as in Piero della Francesca’s sublime Brera Altarpiece which suspends an ostrich’s egg over the head of the Madonna.

Eggstream beauty from Piero

And I’m willing to accept bunny rabbits as Easter symbols, given their famed fecundity and similarity to the Hare, sacred to the Pagan goddess after whom the season is named in English-speaking countries.

But why all the chocolate? Neither eggs nor bunnies exactly summon it to mind in their natural states. My theory is as follows. Even in the unreliable UK summer, the weather tends to get a bit hot for chocolate to be quite as alluring a prospect as it might be in the colder months. In fact I remember a long time ago when I worked at what was then Rowntree Mackintosh, a certain senior manager frowned on sunny days because they were so bad for sales. Prospects for year-round profits have improved for chocolate manufacturers with the development of brand extensions into icecream. But Easter, even a late one as this year, is the last opportunity to move significant quantities of the real stuff before the summer comes along.

That is, before the advent of global warming and the likely contracting of chocolate munching months. Let’s hope Caramel Bunny doesn’t entirely lose her cool in years to come.

Just seen this endearing little video on the web, heralding the arrival in our shops of Levi’s ‘Water<less’ jeans — with more than a nod to the classic commercial ‘Laundrette’ which boosted sales of 501s (and, apparently, revived the fortunes of boxer shorts) as 80s heart throb Nick Kamen removed his to the delight of a gaggle of laundering ladies.

In Marketing Talk’s humble opinion ‘Water<less’ is a slightly misleading act of branding. The jeans are not waterless in the sense of having banished water from how they are made (cf ‘meaningless’). Instead Levis has found a way of finishing the garments which uses less water than its previous processes did. The ‘less than’ symbol (<) clarifies the point in written manifestations of the brand, assuming you’re famliar with mathematical notation of course. Somehow ‘Lesswater’ jeans does not have the same ring, though it’s possibly more accurate.

Still, let us not take away from this step in the right environmental direction. Even the company itself underlines in its press release about the new development that the vast majority of water that goes into a pair of jeans happens before they are manufactured (in cotton irrigation) and after they are sold (as consumers subject them to frequent washes between short bouts of wearing them). But the new development means that in the finishing process (where new pairs of jeans go through a number of washing cycles in order to improve their texture) water consumption is reduced by an average of 28%.

On its own, perhaps this is not such a dramatic environmental claim. But it’s part of a wider branding strategy aiming at sustainable production and consumption. While researching more water-efficient ways of cultivating cotton, Levis is also co-opting consumers in its water-saving effort. The new care tags in each garment feature instructions about reducing the environmental impact of clothes by washing them less often, washing in cold water, line rather than tumble drying and recycling via charity shops when no longer needed.

Cynics might see this as a way of passing the environmental buck to the much put-upon consumer. After all, the majority of global warming takes place because of the activities of organisations rather than individuals. Why not sort out cotton growing and manufacturing before lecturing the jeans-wearing public that they are overdoing it on the washing front?

But perhaps a better way of understanding the ‘Water<less’ launch is as an illustration of how manufacturers and consumers need to act together to create a more sustainable economy. Marketing isn’t just about organisations making and selling things, it’s about consumers using and disposing of them. — a complete system where changes in how manufacturers act need to be complemented by changes in consumer behaviour if they are to have a positive environmental impact.

Coffee-lovers the world over are spluttering into their cappucinos at the news that Starbucks, the Seattle-based global coffee empire, is changing its logo for 2011 and its 40th anniversary. Gone are the words ‘Starbucks Coffee’ and the green ring which contained them and two stars. We are left with the enigmatic female figure alone, untrammelled by letters or border, although she has gone from black to green. Howard Schultz, the entrepreneur who bought the business in 1987 and transformed it from a local supplier of coffee beans, tea and spices, to a business with branches in 55 countries, waxes lyrical about the brand makeover. According to Schultz ‘it enhances and respects our heritage and at the same time evolves us to a point where we feel it’s more suitable for the future.’

The ring, apparently, had been something of a strategic constraint — trapping the organisation, represented by the aforementioned enigmatic female, into established ways of doing things. Its disappearance ‘allowed her to come out of the circle’, ready for a wider range of business opportunites than coffee alone, and possibly more acceptable as an idenity to the visual, non-verbal, international culture in which Starbucks operates. The US marketing academic, Philip Kotler, makes a distinction between what he calls ‘utterable’ and ‘non-utterable’ branding. The latter is branding by non-verbal means such as logos, colours, typefaces, even noises (such as the sound your computer makes on starting up). Utterable branding devices, such as company names and advertising slogans, have their place, but non-verbal symbols communicate more quickly, deeply and internationally (avoiding translation issues). Plus, of course, they connect more readily to our emotions and appetites than to our reason. You can see the attraction for marketers.

This is not, by any means, the first time the logo has changed. The three founders of the original company back in 1971 (two ex-teachers and a writer) had literary notions about branding. They thought about naming the company Moby Coffee after Moby Dick, but somehow the idea of coffee and whales did not quite gel so they settled for Starbucks, after the First Mate of the ship in the book. Far from being a ‘third place’ where you could relax with latte and the papers, their vision was to provide connoisseurs with roasted coffee beans, tea and spices to be ground and enjoyed at home. They concocted a round logo in earthy brown proclaiming ‘Starbucks Coffee Tea Spices’. At its centre was a suitably maritime image, a slightly cleaned up version of a 15th century Norse engraving of a double-tailed mermaid or siren. Perhaps I am missing something about her allure, but I’m surprised to have seen in Schultz’ book Pour your heart into it that the idea here was to symbolise the seductive attraction of the coffee. Make mine a skinny latte and hold the whipped cream.

The brown logo did the trick for Starbuck’s relatively quiet business until the arrival of Howard Schultz. He had different ideas about what a coffee shop could offer, and bought out the founders in 1987, stylising the logo to render  the siren more chaste and changing the colour to green to create a contemporary vibe. In 1992 things changed again as the siren was re-sized. Her rather alarming two-tail appendage all but disappeared, and she flashed less flesh but more face — though if you hadn’t been around at the start of the image’s development in the 1970s you might struggle to understand what all these wavy lines were actually part of.

The 2011 version, while condemned by some observers as tantamount to brandicide, makes sense in terms of how Schultz sees the company moving. As it faces increasing competition from other chains, and possibly decreasing sales in the light of the financial squeeze, it needs to leverage its assets. One of the most valuable is the network of outlets it provides for selling stuff and services which can complement its core offering. It has already made steps into publishing and entertainment, it was a pioneer of wifi access, its business has always been about more than premium coffee. I would not be surprised to see it moving into upmarket fast food (a la Pret) and increasing its media offering. But looking at how other major retailers have transformed their businesses through expanding into areas like financial services and non-food items, who knows what the siren may be adorning over the next decade?