Persuasion, apps and PR: part 2

Note: If you missed part 1, you can read it here.

Before we look at a second kind of apps, let’s remind ourselves why PR exists: to create and nurture two-way relationships with an organization’s audiences.

Why? Well, because it's the nice thing to do, of course; but also because people are more likely to do business with organizations that know them, care about them, and work to respond to their needs.

In PR, as in life, long-term relationships are based on listening and mutual benefit. Organizations that succeed in PR understand what their audiences want, and do their best to give it to them.

Relationship-building strategy: give your audience something you know they want (even if they don't know it yet).

At left is the cover of a little recipe book my Mum gave me from her collection – it contains the recipe for one of our family’s traditional Christmas cookies (just look for the page with splatters on it!). She picked it up (for free) in the baking aisle of the Beacon Hill North A&P store sometime in the 80s, and it became an integral part of our Christmas tradition.

Every Christmas she baked the refrigerator cookies from page 6, and every Christmas she (and her little baking assistants) saw the Robin Hood logo on the front.

While I can’t guarantee she always used Robin Hood flour, or that if she did, she wouldn’t have anyway, when I think of baking with her, it’s the big yellow Robin Hood bag I see. Coincidence? Maybe. Related? Maybe!

The point is, the good folks in Robin Hood’s marketing department gave us a reason to want to be exposed to its logo, frequently, and in association with something positive (Mum’s cookies!).

Principles of persuasion employed in persuading Mum to add Robin Hood advertising to her go-to recipe collection:

• identification – free recipes for cookies my kids will like!
• action – it’s right here in the baking aisle – I don’t have to mail anything away to get it! And it’s small and easy to read, so it’ll be convenient to use.
• clarity – I recognize the Robin Hood logo, and the baked goods on the front cover show me what I’ll get if I try these recipes.
• familiarity and trust – My own mother used Robin Hood flour; they’ve been in the flour business for 75 years (hence the “anniversary edition” recipe booklet), so they ought to know good baking recipes.
  

Sold! (at no charge)… and Robin Hood’s branding was forever associated with our Christmas memories. Aww!

So… the apps?

Many smart companies and organizations are today using apps to do the same job that little recipe booklet did in the 80s for Robin Hood flour.

Rather than simply giving the customer another platform on which to do business with the company, they’re giving the customer something the customer (or potential customer) will want to use, for free – because they know that with repeated exposures to the company’s brand and expertise, the customer will come to regard that company as a trusted source for whatever they sell.

Example 1: NikeWomen Training Club

This free app allows users to set up a personalized training program (on the Nike website) and then access it on their wireless device: “…simply create your Mini, customize your workout, and invite your friends for a little healthy competition.” The app interfaces with Facebook, allowing friends to track their progress against one another’s, encourage each other, etc., and provides workout advice and videos.

There’s no request for a Nike product proof of purchase or a fee of any kind; just an app that will bring one of Nike’s key target audiences (younger women who are interested in fitness) to interact with its brand in a positive way.

Example 2: My Baby Registry by Pampers

This free app allows users to get around the problem of store- or brand-specific baby gift registries, by making it easy to list all the things the family needs in one place. The user can either type in the name of the product, or use the camera on the mobile phone to scan the barcode, with the associated product name automatically being added to the list. The list is then made available online (and again, on Facebook) for anyone who wants suggestions on what to buy for the new family. Not only that: it promises to help with thank-you notes!

Again, no cost, no limitations related to brands – an app that solves problems for its target audience, new parents. And it helps that, since new parents tend to spend time with other new parents (who else would hang out with exhausted people with suspicious-looking stains on the shoulders of all their shirts?), the branding reaches out beyond the actual user to all his/her Facebook friends and anyone else who accesses the list.

Example 3: Petcentric Places by Purina

This free app is, unfortunately, only available in the U.S. for the time being, but I think it’s brilliant. It offers information about the nearest animal shelters, veterinarians, dog parks, groomers, kennels, pet stores, etc… as well as pet-friendly restaurants, hotels, bars, and a range of other businesses, and instant Google Maps to show where they are in relation to where the user is.

Regardless what brand of pet food & products they buy today, pet owners are bound to see the benefits of this free app, and be persuaded to use it. So the Purina brand will become part of that pet family, positioning it for potential sales down the road.

Apps: the new PR frontier

Companies that understand the principles of persuasion are increasingly going to see the benefits custom apps can yield in terms of building strong customer relationships. Apps can:

• offer something with value to the customer (“identification” or “What’s in it for me”)
• make it easy for the customer to interact with the brand (“action”), especially by virtue of the convenience of the wireless platform
• cause repeated customer exposure to the brand (“clarity”)
• position the brand’s expertise and credibility in the area of its own products (“familiarity and trust”)
  

As wireless data devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone, and BlackBerry become ubiquitous and apps become a mainstream way of connecting with organizations, good PR practitioners will be looking for ways to use apps to enhance customer engagement and position their client as “the” resource for whatever they sell.

Nike: move on.

Today, on the eve of Tiger Woods' long-anticipated return to professional golf at the Augusta Masters, Nike released a television commercial.



The ad, called "Earl and Tiger," uses the recorded voice of Woods' late father questioning his son's judgment, over an image of Tiger looking ashamed. In "On Par," The New York Times' golf blog, Richard Sandomir reports the ad first ran this evening at 6 p.m. Eastern on ESPN, and will run only until tomorrow afternoon.

I think it's awful.

Move on.

I and I'm sure hundreds of others in the PR industry have blogged at length about the need to get out in front of an issue that is destined to become a PR problem.

Think David Letterman vs. John Edwards. Letterman admitted to his infidelity before it hit the media, and the story was short-lived (and, frankly, was mostly about how well he handled the PR). Edwards denied, ran, denied, hid, denied, mocked the media outlets uncovering the truth, and denied some more before being spectacularly dragged into admitting it, creating a media circus for himself in the process.

"Tell the truth, tell it first, tell it all" is what we say in issues management. It hurts in the short term, but makes for a much longer long term.

However.

Once an issue has been beaten to death and into the afterlife, as the Tiger-Woods-is-a-no-good-philanderer story surely has, you let it go. You move on to your messages.

For Nike, that means you let Tiger be a golfer again.

Sandomir's "On Par" post quotes Bob Dorfman, the executive vice president of Baker Street Advertising, as saying that "Nike had to address, or at least, allude, to Woods’s personal problems. “They’d take a lot of flack if they didn’t,” he said."

I disagree.

Tiger was decked out in what The Guardian's Lawrence Donegan called his "his Nike-branded sackcloth and ashes" at his news conference at Augusta earlier this week, as he addressed reporters' questions about his return to the game as well as the scandal.

Nike's continued sponsorship of Tiger throughout recent months has communicated the company's commitment to Tiger, the golfer. It doesn't need to make any more comment than that.

Woods' return to golf is the opportunity to turn the page, to re-build Tiger's brand as much as is possible. Sure, the media are likely to keep flogging the sex addiction story -- but by now, it's lost its shock value. People are tired of hearing about it. People want to move on; and as soon as the tournament begins, they may just be more interested in how he plays than how humiliated he is.

That's where Nike should be focusing.

Would you buy these shorts?

I spent the last couple of weeks on vacation, culminating in a great 3-day weekend with my sister at the Rogers Cup Masters tennis tournament in Montreal. The tennis was excellent, the weather cooperated, and the tournament organizers did an outstanding job. Had it not been for this pair of shorts, my blog post about the tournament would’ve been about how the organizers should give master-classes in running a smooth – and fun – event.

But I couldn’t ignore these shorts.

These are Nike shorts, worn by one of the top 10 men’s tennis players in the world. We noted that at least one other player wore the same shorts – in black – but because of their dark colour, they didn’t create the same “issue”.

It was very hot in Montreal last week, and this is a high-performance athlete. But while everyone expects a professional athlete to sweat, no-one wants to wear shorts that show sweat like this.

Sports apparel companies like Nike spend millions sponsoring and outfitting professional athletes across the sporting world, in the hopes that seeing their clothes and equipment on those athletes will build brand loyalty among their legions of fans. It’s a smart strategy, and has delivered customers for decades.
But as this pair of shorts shows, a sponsor company shouldn’t just send off the wardrobe, pay the sponsorship fees and leave it at that. It should watch to ensure the clothing is doing its job for both the athlete and the company: that is, making them both look good.

I have questions about the product itself – shouldn’t athletic clothing be designed to avoid this? Even if these were “extraordinary” circumstances, though, a Nike rep should have seen that these shorts weren’t right for the conditions the first time the player wore them, and hustled up new (dark coloured) pairs before the next match. If worst came to worst, there was a pro shop on the grounds of the tournament – someone could have gone over there with a credit card and bought some new shorts for the player if that’s what it had to come to. But there’s no way this poor guy should have been out there, day after day, in the blazing sun with shorts that looked like this.

It must have been embarrassing for the player; but for my money, Nike’s the one that came out looking bad. It’s an enormous global brand – but after this tournament, I’m sure many of us who attended the Rogers Cup (and who watched it on ESPN, TSN, RDS and other channels that may have been covering the event) have doubts about how they test their fabrics… and may be a little hesitant to pick up the next pair of coloured Nike shorts that catches our eye.

Execution is great – but follow-through is just as important. When managing any kind of event or sponsorship that goes beyond single-hit exposure, it’s just as important to watch and manage the third, or seventh, or hundredth exposure as it is the first.

Another PR lesson from Nike: don’t put yourself in the penalty box

Last week, we thought the story about the dunk heard (but not immediately seen) ‘round the world was finally over.

But it wasn’t – because one of the parties most (presumably) embarrassed by it, sportswear and equipment giant Nike, decided to volunteer for one more media lashing.

Some quick background: on July 6th, Xavier University sophomore Jordan Crawford “dunked on” NBA MVP LeBron James at the LeBron James Skills Academy in Akron, Ohio. Shortly thereafter, Nike officials confiscated video footage (both James and the Skills Academy are sponsored by Nike) from two witnesses who were videotaping the pick-up game. There are conflicting reports as to what prompted that:

- some reports (including this one from ESPN) suggest that James instructed Nike officials to seize the tapes;
- others repeat Nike’s statement that it took the videos because they contravened its media policy.

Either way, it wasn’t Nike's greatest PR move. It made James look petty and vain, and made Nike’s PR machine look a little tone-deaf, if not behind-the-times: in this age of automatic uploads to YouTube, did Nike really think there wasn't at least one more video in the crowd? I'm frankly amazed we haven't seen video of the Nike officials taking the tapes.

Whereas the dunk provided a great opportunity polish James’ reputation as a sportsman, had he chosen to congratulate the student player on a nice dunk, the appearance of trying to sweep it under the rug created a PR problem that had mainstream media and bloggers alike gossiping about it for days.

Then, on July 22nd, the inevitable happened, and two more (unauthorized and, we have to assume, unknown to James and Nike) videos of the dunk came to light. Along with the highly-anticipated videos came a new round of mainstream media and web coverage, as everyone checked out the dunk and waded in as to its relative quality… as well as how badly the whole affair had reflected on LeBron James and Nike.

So… phew. It was finally over, and both LeBron and Nike could go back to what they do best, leaving this embarrassing little incident behind them.

But not quite.

This past Friday, Nike announced it was going to return the confiscated videos of the dunk to their owners.

A former boss of mine used to warn us against “putting ourselves in the penalty box” – that is, proactively doing things that would bring us bad PR. If you’re dealing with an issue that isn’t reflecting well on your organization, get rid of it – all of it – as quickly as you can, and move on. It’s not that different from the rules for getting out bad news, as I discussed in an earlier post about John Edwards’s extra-marital affair: tell the truth, tell it first, and tell it all. That approach will feed far fewer media stories than a drip, drip, drip approach, in which new details spawn new rounds of media coverage, speculation, and general discussion of how you’ve messed up over and over again.

Of course, I don’t know the background on Nike’s decision here – maybe I’m missing something. But surely if they planned to give the tapes back, or if there was even any latitude for them to give the tapes back, they could have done it two days earlier, when the other two unauthorized videos came out. That would have made the return of the videos a footnote in all the excitement about the dunk footage – as opposed to the catalyst for another round of media coverage of this less-than-shining moment in Nike's expensive sponsorship of LeBron James.

For the sake of posterity, here’s the dunk (from ebaumnation.com, not the Nike-confiscated video, which I haven’t yet found on YouTube). It comes about 35 seconds in, and is repeated in slow-mo around the 1:00 mark.